Point 1 - it wasn't stylistically consistent with later chapters. When I wrote the original Chapter 1 I didn't realize that this story was going to be funny. The part where Harry bites a math teacher in the original Chapter 2 is the exact part where I realized this story was going to be funny.

Point 2 - I got tripped up by the differences between the published SF I knew and the expectations of fanfiction. If you saw a character talking like that in a published SF novel, you would know that he was an alien or genetically engineered or that the author meant you to know something was funny about him. In fanfiction they assume that it's either the author's conceit or, more probable yet, you're just a terrible author who can't write realistic eleven-year-olds. I thought it was so blatantly lampshaded that nobody could possibly mistake it for an accident, but no, fanfiction readers just don't think like that - they don't look for clues and they do assume lousy authors. So I made Harry's intellect slightly more subtle in the first chapter and let it dawn slightly more slowly.