I have to disagree with you on the point of the bad guys being unambiguously bad. Robert Redford does bring up a good point in the climax, if your daughter was taken hostage, and you could stop her captor simply by pressing a switch, would you? While he may be the antagonist, it's pretty clear he's only doing what he believes is best for the world. That doesn't justify his actions at all, but it does make him more than your generic, mustache-twirling villain. While the other HYDRA agents are clearly generic goons, he stands out as a unique figure in the MCU, the first villain to act out of unselfish motivations. That helps this film a long way.
I'm a geek.
Might want to stick a spoiler alert on your reply. Spoilers below in mine as well.
Robert Redford's character belongs to a Neonazi organisation and his plan involves murdering millions of "undesirables" across the globe. He also employs assassins, engages in brainwashing, betrays literally every sympathetic character in the movie and personally murders a civilian. He's totally, completely evil.
For the record, I agree that the movie generally runs on Black & White logic (although Nick Fury is kind of gray), but I didn't mind in the slightest. I can excuse the somewhat simplistic narrative on the grounds that they're trying to convey a fairly important message about the security state to a massive action movie audience, and I'm completely exhausted with Dark Knight-esque gritty antiheroes.
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The cast is great and the effects are good, but the story leaves a lot to be desired.
"The Winter Solider" is effectively one big, prolonged attempt to wrench the Captain America franchise away from the high-flying pulp adventure tones of the first movie and push it towards the more typical "dark and gritty" atmosphere of the other Marvel movies. Good-bye, Nazis with laser beams. Hello, heavy-handed 9/11 imagery.
We could go back and forth on the merits of that all day, but the bigger point is that the movie just doesn't do it very well. For all the gunfire and bombs, all the collapsing buildings and ruined cityscapes, all the so-called political intrigue and talk of "freedom versus security" in a world that moves in shades of gray, the movie is actually incredibly black-and-white. Despite how much the characters SAY that you can't trust anyone, the good guys turn out to be exactly who you'd think they'd be and the bad guys turn out to be unambiguously bad. What we're told is completely contrary to what we're shown, and what we're shown is actually a world where everyone is either cartoonishly good or cartoonishly evil. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with that approach, and it worked perfectly well in the first movie, which was deliberately cheesy and overblown, but here, in this one, it completely contradicts the entire mood the film is clearly trying to build.
The one genuinely "gray" thing in the movie, one of its final story beats which I won't repeat here for the sake of spoilers, is glossed over incredibly quickly and carries absolutely no consequences for the heroes even though it obviously should have. Logically, it SHOULD have gotten hundreds of innocent people killed, and it SHOULD have gotten the heroes locked up or executed as a result, and if the movie was actually true its message of moral ambiguity, it would have relished the opportunity to explore these facts — to show that in today's world, there's no such thing as a perfect answer and so such thing as an easy way out. Instead, easy ways out are all we ever get, and the heroes walk away pristine and unsullied. It's proof that the movie's political backdrop really was just a flimsy backdrop, nothing more than an excuse to make all the gratuitous booms and bangs and action set pieces happen rather than a genuinely thoughtful piece of insight.