Rewatched Captain America and the Winter Soldier. I found it surprising just how little screentime the titular Winter Soldier actually has. He has like 10-15min total screentime in a 2 hour movie. And his first appearance was fairly close to the 1-hour mark. Also, I misremembered how frequently the "Hail Hydra" slogan was said. I could've sworn it was said onscreen way more often than it actually was.
While I don't dislike the movie, I didn't much care for it outside of its two admittedly awesome action scenes. I think a big factor was the central plot/theme of the movie. I felt like the director was saying to me: "You thought SHIELD and related authorities were the good guys? Fool! They're crooked and they're secretly plotting to kill/enslave you!" So, the bad guys are bad and the good guys are bad. Very, very few people are trustworthy. And the authorities at large can't be trusted and should not be powerful. Because you can't trust *almost* anyone. Quite a large spoonful of pessimism in my otherwise idealistic superhero films. :/
And this movie, combined with Age of Ultron, really paint a picture of high-tech attempts to step up security as inherently dangerous crapshoots at best, and liberty-robbing or planet-annihilating at worst. I suppose they had to fail for purely dramatic reasons, but damn, the implications here are pretty damning and a luddite's wet dream.
All cards on the table, I gravitate heavily towards Iron Man precisely because it highlights the promise of technology to solve problems and create a better world, even while acknowledging that technology also causes its share of problems (see Armor Wars and the Technovore two-parter)