Phase 1:
Iron Man
Hulk (Ruffalo)
Thor
Black Widow = Captain America
Hulk (Norton)
Hawkeye
Avengers 1 was the best that the Hulk has been all the way up to the present. I'm still waiting for them to make Banner as likable and compelling again as he was here.
Phase 2:
Captain America
Ant Man
Iron Man
Star Lord
Black Widow
Hulk
Hawkeye
Thor
This was the era of Captain America for me. The character grew leaps and bounds into a likable character and a good leader. I felt like he wasn't particularly Captain America-ey in Avengers 1, but they built him back up in TWS and AoU.
Phase 3 (So Far):
Iron Man
Dr. Strange
Captain America
Iron Man climbed back on top for me because of how great they handled his development here. Watching the sine wave of how he was motivated and driven to be heroic in IM1 down into his slump in IM2 back into a crescendo in Avengers 1 and another slump in IM3 and one more bounce up in AoU. Civil War was definitely his hardest crash yet, but each slump got more intense due to the new layers that were draped onto the character from his previous failure-to-slump episode.
The PTSD from Avengers 1 led him to be paranoid enough into inventing an AI sort of fascist-minded monster of a robot that he wanted to protect the world in ways that he felt he failed to in A1, and now watching the team of humans (and one more AI) that he had hoped would protect the world in the place of Ultron was now falling apart. I can imagine how that would rip him up emotionally and put him into the compromised state we saw him in at the end of CW during his fight with Cap and Bucky.
The above is exactly why I get irritated when people talk about how bad of a character Iron Man became after Civil War. No he's not a bad character now. They're evolving him by having him act as a product of the negative s*** he's be dragged through from the start of the story like a person in real life might degrade after suffering a seris of great failures or tragedies. It makes the character compelling and more real and I love it.
Cap didn't have the luxury of that sort of story threading or development I don't think. He hasn't moved or changed much since TWS. He's still bent out of shape over the whole "My best friend survived but was brainwashed to be evil and now I've gotta obsess over proving to the world that he's not a monster". That's perfectly fine, but I'd like to see him move past that soon.
