Tony, you say SES has lost you with his statement that War is defeating the enemy strategically, then immediately state exactly that!
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The RAF's doctrine, developed in the 1920s, was based on the proposition that the objective of all three Services was the same - to defeat the enemy nation, and not merely its Army, Navy or Air Force.
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Your contention is that the fuses were faulty, therefore Bomber Command should not have used bombs. What should it have used, then?
You fight the enemy with the best weapons at your disposal.
As Andrei points out, without Bomber Command, Germany would have had her manpower and industrial capability freed to be more effective in all its campaigns.
Germany never freed its bomber force from that of the Army or Navy and never put into service an effective strategic bomber. BC aircraft carried a greater weight of bombs with a smaller crew than the USAAF.
One other aspect regarding "faulty" fuses might be explained by aircraft being damaged and jettisoning bombs unarmed.
Your take on this has been to swallow whole one aspect, being faulty fuses, and throw the baby out with that bathwater.
Why not ask why the RAF didn't simply mass produced thousands more Mosquitoes, only 2 crew, faster and with the same bomb load as a B17!! Mix night fighter variants with the bombers to pick off intruders and the War might have been won in 1944, without the need for all those Churchill tanks!!
Rather than re-engineer the Lanc for better crew escape, a more pertinent question would be the failure to provide heavy bombers with a ventral, not a nose, turret.
I remain convinced that BC was the War winning element, maybe not used as effectively with benefit of hindsight, but in the best way known at the time.
The courage of those young men to take to the skies night after night, contending not only with a determined enemy but also weather, navigation and formation problems is akin to those poor soldiers in WW1 on the Western Front.
Incidentally, faulty fuses were as great, if not greater, issue in WW1 artillery, so perhaps you'd give us an assessment of that?