With 2025 being planned to fill out all the bluewater trees with famous and modern battleships, Gaijin must set a fair standard to all nations on what determines their reload. Currently it is all over the place, some ships have their reload rates based on low angle test firings as can be seen with German and Japanese ships, which provide them a huge advantage to levels being unfair. Others have their reload based on combat data and realistic range target practice such as the US Standards and as seen on the dev server, Rodney.
It is a rule that Gaijin doesn’t count elevation rates when determining a ships reload, but the data some ships are based on count the seconds lowering the gun to a load angle. As seen in this accepted bug report for the Standards here , when not elevating their guns for short range battle practice even Standards can match or even exceed 2 round per minute.
Other nations must be judged to the same level because playing any ship with a more than 40 second reload is both boring and frustrating. Either use data from close range practice for all ships or treat RoF as a balancing tool like in ground forces.