There's a lot to like about this hypothesis. It doesn't require any additional characters, and exploiting Dumbledore's love of stories and Snape's love of Lily would be very Quirrell. I can see two problems with it. Quirrell has acted like he takes prophecies seriously, which seems to me more consistent with someone who believes in them than one who orchestrates them. It also doesn't seem to have been necessary. As far as I know, we haven't been given any reason for him to have suddenly changed direction and abandoned his war. If he'd just stayed the course, he'd have won.
In the passage you link to, I don't think Quirrell was interested in the prophecy as much as the plot that took Skeeter down. He seemed generally interested in the latter, and the demand for the paper was one of those "give me that's" where incredulity is pushed too far on something otherwise believed to be real.
As for objection #2, how would he have defeated the invincible Dumbledore, holder of the Elder wand?
In my preferred scenario, where Voldemort uploads into Harry as Harry seemingly defeats Voldemort, Voldemort doesn't have to defeat Dumbl...
The new thread, discussion 13, is here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. With three chapters recently the previous thread has very quickly reached 1000 comments. The latest chapter as of 25th March 2012 is Ch 80.
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: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.
As a reminder, it's often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
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: