Captain plot hole and the repetitive threat

(SPOILER WARNING)

I saw Captain America: the Winter Soldier on Saturday night and even though I enjoyed it immensely there were a few plot holes that prevent me from calling it the best Marvel film of all. Yes, the predecessors in the franchise all had their flaws too (I'm still trying to forget the first Thor film) but I don't feel that their flaws were as far reaching as CA2's. Remember that I still liked the film. The action sequences were excellent and I love Steve and Natasha's interactions. I also loved the congruity with the TV show. However, those delights didn't compensate for the rest of the film being poorly written.

Two of my friends have commented on their blogs that Hydra's presence within S.H.I.E.L.D. should have been discovered years prior. They're right. Someone would have let something slip in conversation or an intercepted communiqué that would have started an internal investigation. I also have problems with Hydra's reasoning, as explained by Zola. He claimed that the only way for them to succeed was to have the people freely surrender their liberty but when they were allied with the Nazis that's exactly what they had. Not across the entire globe of course though they had enough of it. If that approach had already failed than why try it again?

I also had big problems with the Winter Soldier. First was that he had supposedly been operating for fifty years without anyone catching him or discovering his identity. Again, someone would have found something in all that time. They also eluded to his having been repeatedly frozen, thawed, and had his memories forcefully repressed. Unless he possessed the healing powers of Wolverine he shouldn't have been able to survive that. One freeze and thaw, sure. But a repeated course over fifty years? No way. And since we're on the subject of his abilities wouldn't the changes resulting from the Hydra experiments have manifested during the many operations he, Steve, and the rest of the team carried out in Europe during WWII?

My second problem with the Winter Soldier was that he was Bucky. In the first Captain America they used him for the gut-wrenching plot twist. That they did the same thing with the same character a second time is lazy. They could have expounded on Steve's dissolution with S.H.I.E.L.D. or the fact that the Winter Soldier was a Hydra operative and that would have been enough, I think. The fact that they went ahead with this copycat twist when they took the time to give Thor and Iron Man new and interesting conflicts is appalling. Especially when they negate all Steve's "I don't want to fight my friend" stance in the final fight scene. If Steve was so against it why did he throw the first punch?

The last plot hole that should have been addressed was Zola. If his mind and the algorithm was so essential to Hydra's operations why hadn't he been uploaded to a more modern interface? Those circuit boards shouldn't have been operable and the speed of modern components would have made the transfer worth the risk.

In any other film all of these flaws would have made me call it a massive failure. Fortunately for them the first class fight scenes made me a very happy bloodthirsty girl. Oh, and the relationships and the continuity with the TV show. But mostly the violence.