I thought "Hydroclear" was ConocoPhillips' brand name for their Group II+ and Group III severely hydroprocessed base oils that the company uses in blending and also sells to other blenders. (These grades of base oil stocks are water-white clear in their natural, unadditized state.) Pure speculation on my part, but I tend toward the notion that the ConocoPhillips brands (Union 76, Conoco All Season, Kendall GT-1, and Phillips 66 TropArtic) are much more like Motorcraft, if not identical, than different*. While some of the different brands of SM/GF-4 oils have more additive content than others, there seems to be a belief trend showing up from posted VOAs that the ones with higher additive content are the ones starting with lower base stock quality. I don't doubt they'll all work, but, given a choice, I'd prefer more robust base stocks as the starting point than depending on additional chemistry to help lower quality base oils meet the performance goals of the finished motor oil.
*Even the online product data sheets for ConocoPhillips own brands show differing values for certain performance parameters for anyone bothering to look them up. But, it wouldn't necessarily follow that any particular CP brand is "best" since we have no idea whether the posted brand results were taken from different production batches - there'll always be measurable variations from one batch to the next. I suspect to some degree the posted sheets indicate the allowable range of variation that any of these brands can display from production batch to batch and still be within allowable current API, ILSAC, and OEM motor oil quality specifications.
