"Stupid enough to get close to a CL?" you know that it's supposed to be "the CL was stupid enough to get close to a BB"... and even if he doesn't get into close range, it's easy enough to constantly hit BB's at 10-14km range and with that RoF you can easily correct your shots.
Now you can say, it is not only because of the cleveland, no...RNGesus is also a factor for us BB players, but there's no other ship which causes so much problems...it has a nano citadel or it seems like, because I have never ever hit a clevelands citadel after the armor change... AP either goes through, so it does no Dmg, or it does 1k dmg. HE can't pen it and for 30s+ reload time the dmg potential is to low...
"Play with the speed"..yeah... you can do that against other BB's which have 30s+ reload time...a competent Cleveland player will just laugh at you and keeps shooting and sets you on fire again and again...