One of the chief reasons the raid did not go ahead, was that the Germans knew they'd probably get the same thing shoved down their necks ten times over.
It was very much the policy of the
Independent Force to do that sort of thing, and many British politicians are on record as not being too fussy if bombs aimed at a barracks or a railway junction in a town centre went a bit wide and took out a row of houses instead, since that is what had been happening courtesy of the Zeppelins and Gothas over Britain, and at the time it was generally thought that such a thing would have a positive effect as far as damaging enemy morale was concerned.
When the Independent Force began raiding towns in Germany as reprisals against the German Zeppelin and Gotha raids on the UK, it was a precursor to the sort of thing that became common in WW2, but at that time the chief result of such relatively small raids was observed to be terror and complaints to the Government, so the German government, already on fairly shaky ground politically as far as the populace was concerned, were worried that heavier reprisal raids might lead to a breakdown of morale and extensive rioting etc.
Of course WW2 shows us, with things such as raids on Coventry and places like it, that in actual fact the opposite is usually true, with the people under such suffrage normally getting more pissed off with the enemy and thus throwing themselves into the war effort with greater fervour, in order to prevent such things happening again. But in 1918, that phenomenon was not really understood, as evidenced by the King showing up in Coventry after the raid by the Luftwaffe, which was largely to quell what they thought might cause a mass panic, until they learned that most civilian populations can 'take it', albeit largely because they ain't got much choice in the matter.
Al