Looking at the savegame from the AAR, I guess it depends on the priorities you have assigned to research areas.
Eg if you have low priorities in a research areas, which have many early techs and high priority in areas which have few early techs, you are essentially harming yourself.
Since it is very hard to research techs before their time, I guess the "high" priority "wastes" a lot of effort on stuff you simply can not yet research efficiently.
Eg you have high priority on subdivision, yet this field has no 1900 tech, only a 1901 tech. Same goes for submarines. Those are 2 of your 3 high research settings not being efficient in the first year.
And you have a lot of low priority areas, making the effect even more pronounced by redistributing even more research into those 2 areas.
In contrast, turrets, ship design and torpedos have low priority although they have relatively easy 1900 research projects.
I m not 100% certain that this is how it works, though it would explain it and I seemed to have better results when I took that into consideration (though I sill have not figured out how to reliably research better than 12 inch guns as germany).
Another issue might be, that you have a UK research advantage in "ship design", yet you have that area set to low priority. I suspect the research advantage works as some sort of multiplier, so the higher your initial input into that area, the stronger the effect of that national advantage (I guess up to the point where all techs in that area for that year are researched and you waste research points as described above).