I believe
@Ravenor explained that theres like only a difference of 5 IQ points between Chris and Phil. The main difference is that Phil can carry on a conversation better than Chris and you might not think hes exceptional based on first impressions.
For better and for worse, Phil has a rudimentary kind of street-smartness that is totally absent in Chris. This allows him to identify victims.
I'm inclined to agree with Ravenor; Phil may be slightly smarter than Chris, but they're both idiots, and there's not a significant difference in their intelligence. If anything, Chris being stupid may actually help him out a bit. He has some pretty nasty personality traits too, but mostly, Chris comes off as a good natured loser, a bit weird, but mostly harmless. It's only once in a while that some of his more malicious, self-serving traits come out, and at least some of that owes to the influence of Barb, or even the trolling.
Phil... well, he still comes off as exceptional, and it's not just his faux edgelord costume or the childish doodles covering his body. That whiny voice that sounds like he's still struggling with puberty, the stilted way in which he holds conversations, even his awkward gait all point to someone who is a bit... well, slow in the head, to appropriate a CWCism. I don't think you could go more than a few minutes of seeing him without thinking he should have a helmet and a wrangled. And ironically, he apparently DID at one point, voluntarily, because he thought it made him look like a bicycle riding trans latinx something....
I think the big difference isn't so much that Phil has any real sense of 'street smart,' because he really doesn't appear to, beyond a fear of pain, and interacting with real homeless people or minorities. The real difference is that Phil seems to have some sort of antisocial behaviour where he wants to associate with what he views as dangerous and bad ass. He wants to present himself as this weird tattooed bicycle riding translatinx ecoterrorist, but really, at the end of the day, it's just a costume, a RPG hea playing. It's like he's glommed on to certain stereotypically 'left' leaning ideas and images and tried to impress people with them.
I don't think Phil has particularly good social skills, BUT he has found communities that believe in blindly accepting anyone who claims to be oppressed, and he's pretty good at exploiting them. I think part of it is that he started young, and is still able to seem vulnerable, which makes them initially more sympathetic to him. But as we've sewn, Phil has a remarkable talent for burning bridges. Even other troons who think they can exploit him wind up wanting nothing to do with him.
In the end, Phil is a much more toxic person than Chris ever could be, and he's much more self-destructive as well. Chris may be slowly killing himself with junk food, and probably will have a hard time coping after Barb kicks the bucket; I'm not sure he could really hold down even a minimum wage burger flipping job. But Phil? Every stupid tattoo he gets, every hundred dollars he wastes on bicycle accessories that he'll never use, all of that is just him rushing head first into his own oblivion. There's no planning for the future. He worries more about whether he can impress some SJW he's never met than whether he can feed and cloth himself in a month.
The weirdest thing is how both of them, and a lot of other lolcows, have jumped onto the whole tranny bandwagon, but I think that may just be a generational thing. Indeed, with trannies becoming so ubiquitous in American pop culture, it looks like Phil is feeling left out.