I don't think Thor in Avengers is like that. That might work for Hulk or anti-heros in general. Thor's a straighter hero and 2nd only to Cap in nobility on this team. Now that the Avengers intro is out the way and the next threat is not personal to him I'd rather he had more screentime and was a part of the core leaving others to take the wild card role.
Of course the rest of the cast doesn't deserve as much as RDJ but I think it's wrong for Marvel to low ball them as much as they want to. Marvel have always been cheapskates though so I'm not shocked.
This is probably going to end up what keeps this cast together. I understand it from both Marvel and the cast's POV. Marvel has to keep costs down so they can continue making movies like this and fund the individual ones as well. The cast wants to be compensated at a fair rate, given the amount of money the movies make and how little they got the first time around. I really hope they can find a good price point so they keep making movies like TA and also the individual ones while keeping the actors happy enough that it doesn't feel like a burden for them.
I think some have speculated that because when he's flipping through his father's notebook trying to figure out what he's supposed to be looking for there's a diagram of the Tesseract on one page (he doesn't linger on the page or anything, but it's there).
I'd say based on the fact that a cube-like drawing was in Howard Stark's notebook that Tony was looking at while trying to solve the arc reactor's core element problem.
