Also, it's interesting to see surface warships change over time on where to put the helipad, hangar, guns, and missile systems.
Over time, the consensus seems to be front gun, front VLS, front CIWS, aft hangar with aft CIWS on top, stern helipad, no rear gun. Rear VLS seems split between midship between hangar and superstructure where older designs might put their anti-ship missile cannisters (Type 052D, Type 055, some of the European proposals for AAW destroyers) and inside the hangar structure (Burke, Sejong the Great, Maya, Atago).
Burke Flight I/II and Kongo classes are an aberration in not having a hangar at all.
But before that, you see experiments like swapping the position of the (non-VLS) missile launchers with the gun (Virginias put the gun behind the missile launchers), no guns at all (Leahy-class), rear gun only (Belknap-class), midship guns (USS Long Beach), elevators/underdeck hangar (Virginia-class again), midship helipad and hangar forward of the rear missiles/gun (Spruance, Kidd, Tico, Sovremenny), midship gun on top of the superstructure (Oliver Hazard Perry)
It's easy to see why some of those layouts weren't adopted too. The Long Beach guns must have had a fairly narrow field of fire. The elevators on the Virginia-class supposedly suffered from leak issues their entire life. And the mid-ships layouts required a high helipad and hangar, which couldn't have helped the already-high center of gravity of ships that already had a lot of superstructure to deal with.