copperbadge:

Well, remember, the Hulk as an experiment in re-creating the super-soldier is very recent — I’d have to check with Mage for the precise date but I believe it only dates to the Ed Norton Hulk film. But to make it easy, let’s stick with MCU for now and ignore the comics, because in MCU Hulk was an attempt to re-create the Super Soldier Serum, though Bruce Banner wasn’t apparently aware of that. 

I don’t think we’d see the Hulk sooner, at least in America, but the why of that is a complicated one.

If Erskine had lived, the Serum formula would have been in his control, which I don’t think was an accident; Erskine came from Nazi-controlled Germany and he presumably had a very healthy paranoia about authority. Even if the US had no plans to kill him, he knew that they wouldn’t dare think about it so long as he was the only one who knew the formula. It also meant he could exercise the same rigorous quality control on later test subjects that he did when choosing Steve. Phillips, for all his likeable qualities, was a military man in wartime and like most of the people he represented, he wanted the biggest, dumbest asshole to get the treatment — if Erskine didn’t control who got it, then the Army would start shoving men like Gilmore Hodge into the Sarcophagus of Pretty. And as we know, in the Sarcophagus of Pretty, good gets better, and bad gets worse. So you either get a lot of indestructible bullies, or you get a lot of dead ones. Erskine won’t have that.   

So you have Erskine who is willing to make super soldiers but who is not going to unless they pass his personal inspection. The government’s still getting its soldiers, even if it’s not getting them super fast. Maybe they want more than Erskine is willing to give, but a bureaucracy at rest tends to stay at rest; as long as Erksine’s willing to play ball, it’s unlikely that anyone but a psychotic would push for parallel experimentation just so they could get more soldiers, and highly unlikely it would get funding. 

There was a fanfic once, I wish I could remember where, that had one character talking about how it was a good thing Erksine died, because then the genetic arms race would have kicked into high gear, and you’d get armies of Super Soldiers running around fucking shit up. Another character pointed out that no — if personality affects how one reacts to the Serum, then what you get for candidates are people like Steve Rogers — people who will not use their power for personal gain, who will not blindly follow orders, and who will not stand to see the powerful dominate the weak. So what you end up with are a bunch of rational, thoughtful, stridently anti-authoritarian and nearly indestructible men who are trained to work well together and collaborate to achieve their goals. I can’t think the military would want too many of them.

If we did see a Hulk, I don’t think it would be an American one; I think it would be the product of Russia, post-war, trying to break the cold war stalemate by producing its own super soldiers with partial information taken from spies in America.

A literal Red Hulk, if you will.