McCarthy visibly improved at CB as the year wore on and surpassed Soares (at least for 2012). I wonder if the problem with the McCarthy/Soares tandem was that Tierney/Alston constantly left them out to dry. I think the fullback positions are the offseason priority for improvement as opposed to CB.
I responded to you a number of times in other threads about this, so I'm not going to go on a long diatribe here. Simply, McCarthy was not good this year, nor was he suitable. The one thing I will respond to (re: McCarthy) is this comment about being 11th in goals against. 11...of 19. That's certainly not good. And that is forgetting the fact that taking GA as some sort of indicator is totally foolish in assessment. I am on board with some statistical analysis, especially some of the new metrics, but individual GA is far from the list of any things to even consider. The amount of external factors that go into GA, are sometimes (even often) independent from the reality of how well specific players played. I've also not said Shuttleworth can't be good. I think there is probably more support for Shuttleworth as GK than there is for McCarthy as CB. Just go look at the two threads that discussed Reis' potential departure and the one on Knighton (I think that's the one). If anything, it shows that fans are far more willing to go with the devil they don't know. Which, doesn't make them right or wrong, btw.