Okay, here is another thing.  Based on CA:TWS – The Winter Soldier largely sucks at the job they gave him. The job that HYDRA threw him at.  No, wait hear me out.

It’s not discussed much in the MCU except in very elided terms (yay, movies and narrative) but it’s pretty clear if you fill in the holes from the comics that Bucky’s job is largely sabotage and assasination. They use him as a destabilizer, a ghost. And then they take this weapon and try to use it like a BFG. It’s such an odd choice for a group that’s supposed to be that smart, that they turn around and basically use this extremely expensive and specialized tool as a blunt instrument – and it’s not stupid people that do it, it’s people that are theoretically cunning. 

It makes me want to write the backstory and fill in what tipped Pierce’s hand early enough to essentially throw away a tool like that on what was probably going to be a one time use, maybe twice if the odds end up in his favor.  [Fury wanting to delay Insight is clearly part of it but I’m wondering why after decades of planning what was so critical about that moment that he wasn’t willing to spend a few more years and get around Fury instead of what he did which is force everything forward and did it badly.] [Yes, I know villains are supposed to have Moments of Stupid™ to advance the plot but really?]

So here is my thinking that maybe backs the bad at the job they sent him to do:

1. He’s deployed out against Fury. He blows up the SUV but Fury gets away. It’s broad daylight. It’s uncontrolled space in the middle of an urban center. It’s against a high profile (media profile: you can’t tell me Fury has avoided television with SHIELD going public and that big building on the Potomac) high value target. This is not how you do business, at least not typically. Who were they going to blame it on?

[There is an implied missing scene that I haven’t seen in fic yet. WS tracking Fury to Steve’s apartment. It’s clearly the same day/evening. WS needed Steve to turn on the light (maybe?) to positively site the target because the shot comes seconds later after more talking to define the location.]

2. He’s sent out to shoot Fury and doesn’t kill him – now this one could be argued that this was some kind of plan to draw out Captain America and forward HYDRA’s plans but at least on the surface, he didn’t kill the guy. [This one is complicated because of the double blind of Fury ‘dying’ but not dying.] He almost gets caught by Cap.  This ghost assassin that is a rumor and legend in the intelligence community for 50 years. In an urban environment that is loaded with cameras [yes, we’ll ignore the inconsistency that SHIELD wants all the cameras and twitter to track down Cap in the last third of the movie but they don’t use it to get a positive ID on WS for the rest of the film *handwave*]

3. He’s sent out to stop Cap and the Black Widow on the highway overpass. He gets part of the job done and then the cops/STRIKE team come out and finish it. Again, we have another direct conflict which is such an odd choice. Dude is a sniper, and metal arm notwithstanding close combat skills and distance skills are not things that normally are found in the same person. [Yes, it’s comic books but Cap is the exception to the rule there too – he’s got the Shield for his distance weapon and he’s a brawler. It’s not common.  Extreme short range, short range, long range, extreme long range. These are your archtypes and in real world weapon design this is one of those places where you can’t cheat.] [That said, they gave WS the metal arm which is clearly for short range beat the shit out of things but who else but another ‘super’ is going to even going to be able to compete with that? He can cave in metal, an unaltered human doesn’t stand a chance but why bother getting that close if you have a sniper rifle?] 

Here is where I say that I think they did WS a bit of a disservice and didn’t show us that he’s a tactical thinker like we saw Bucky being in TFA. You can imply it if you squint with him asking for a different weapon and deploying the team a certain way in the overpass battle and if you really squint you might be able to say he planned the Fury attack, chose the sniper secondary attack but we don’t know if he has that much capability/will in the movie. It simply isn’t said in any concrete way at all.

4. He’s sent out to do a head to head battle with Cap to finish it all. To me this really is Pierce writing off WS as a tool and an asset. Even if WS wins the fight and takes Cap down and that is by no means a given, he doesn’t trust the tool not to break given how fast the conditioning was breaking down. 

Pierce is the guy who literally doesn’t care what anything costs. He shoots his housekeeper because she saw the WS. He throws away a tool that’s had hundreds of hours of work and who knows how much money and technology poured into it all to take over the world. Each of the moments with Pierce builds a picture for you about the way he dehumanizes everything around him.

tldr- they took a precision made tool and turned it into the bluntest hammer and set it loose on the highest, nastiest setting they could. It was literally such a waste of resources.