Discuss @AndyC 's latest article here
The desire for the Bomber Command types to pull them away is also very real, but the fact that these fly very slowly in comparison to most bombers makes them less "sexy" and attractive to the Bomber Harris type people. There's also a fairly disastrous PoD there, though, when all of this was in position and they did misuse them for bomber support, as you suggest they might.
Huh.
Ultra-long-duration / loitering bombing missions.
I hadn't thought of that.
Regarding submarine aircraft carriers:4 - The other side would have evolved attempts to stop them. I think that ASW would have been the hardest to stop (outside of submarine aircraft carriers? Could that even be remotely possible); anti-airship airships would run into aeroplane screen issues (only for ultra-long-range vs ultra-long-range options, but that's still a very evocative idea). You'd probably see redeployment of air defence networks to protect the heartlands that were previously out of range - but that has knock-on effects that they are no longer deployed as per OTL (there's a limit to resources, after all...)
5 - Airship production would be ramped up considerably due to 1,2,3 (and part of 4). This leaves a whole bunch more airships by the end of the war and new roles being searched for.
I went with that option in WIAF, the tycoon in question being Song Ziwen a.k.a. T.V. Soong, one of the richest men in China, who OTL was the brother-in-law of Sun Yat-sen and Jiang Jieshi. He orders two airships from Goodyear Zeppelin in the late 1920s with the intention of starting his own international transport company, only to have one crash in 1932 and the other one be commandeered by the Chinese military at the start of the Sino-Japanese War. The latter shows up in @Bruno's story "The Road to Yakutia" featured in the book. In the end Song's involvement in airships fails to make a difference in the greater scheme of things.But the early 20th Century also had a considerable number of rich individuals (maybe not quite as noticeable as the tycoons of the 19th century), but if one such had caught the airship bug, it is possible they could have either been more popular at the time of the PoDs above, or even stubbornly remained plying the air lanes.