I think the female sex in HPMOR comes off poorly for three reasons:
The major adults are mostly men. "Female" ends up also signifying "childlike."
The author doesn't want to write sports stories. The girls get comic stories about relationships, but the boys don't get comic stories about Quidditch.
Hermione and McGonagall are not tragic or ambitious. Draco and Dumbledore can "level up" in HPMOR to agendas worthy of Harry's, but Hermione and McGonagall, being largely tame cooperators, are overshadowed by their even-grander-than-before comrades.
If we wanted to imagine alternate versions of the fic with less of this difficulty, some conceivable changes would be:
Give Hermione and McGonagall risk-defying agendas of their own. (Make them Aragorns or Boromirs, not Gimlis and Pippins.)
Make the boy students gossip improbably about the teachers' and students' Evil Overlord Plans just as much as the girl students gossip improbably about the teachers' and students' Romantic Entanglements. ("No way, dude! Snape's going to take out Quirrell with his Godelian Braid Potion!")
Make Harry need the help of other students more, so that we can understand the girls' gossip as how they let off steam and not as what unimportant people do.
But I think this fic is too nearly done, and too big, to contemplate such changes at this point.
Which adults do you consider major? Dumbledore, Quirrel, Snape, and McGonagall seem the definites, with Moody, Tonks, Flitwick, and Bones as second-stringers. That's 1/4 or 3/8, which is majority-male but not absurd.
I do like your second suggestion, though, even if your first is hard to reconcile with canon, and your third is hard to reconcile with MOR!Harry.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 87. The previous thread has passed 500 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: