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DavidAgain comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 16, chapter 85 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm skeptical that people who've taken a long time to accept that Quirrel is Voldemort constitute a significant proportion of HPMoR readers. Sure, I've noticed a considerable number of them too, but HPMoR has a lot of readers. There's a risk of availability bias here; a reader who expresses skepticism that Quirrel is Voldemort automatically attracts attention from anyone who thinks it's obvious, whereas other people who think it's obvious don't.
Personally, I've had no trouble at all accepting that Quirrell is evil ever since his first class, where he praised Harry's killing instinct. Villains pointing out and encouraging protagonists' darker impulses is a time honored trope, and praising an eleven year old in front of a whole class of other children for his drive to kill seems pretty indicative of evil to me.
Part of the problem is what 'he is Voldemort' really means: he isn't like canon Voldemort or even with how MOR Voldemort is reported to be.
As for his obvious evil: it's too obvious, he seems to be the sort who enjoys playing the cynical villain but is actually, if not nice, at least nice to his friends. And Harry seems to be a friend. If he was trying to manipulate Harry he wouldn't have called it intent to kill, he'd have called it being decisive or intelligent or somesuch.
Oddly enough, open villainy can be a great cloak for subtle villainy.
To be honest, I'm not even sure if Voldemort is Voldemort, in the sense of being the man behind the proverbial curtain here. Everything about him from the name up screams "assumed persona": he's far more theatrical a figure than a blood-purist demagogue would need to be, and some aspects of what he does even look counterproductive in that context. And while the canon Tom Riddle did all the same stuff and all for no particularly good reason, in the context of MoR I think we can assume that there's an agenda behind it.
I don't know for sure what that agenda is yet, but a good first step seems to be this question: why would you want to pose as a supervillain? As it happens, Eliezer has touched on that before.
More proof:
Added to this...
...would seem to suggest that Quirrelmort was pretending.
As you pointed out, Eliezer has suggested that humanity might benefit from a Dark Lord to unite against.
And Quirrell has used Voldemort as a reason for magical britain to unite.
To clarify, this is only weak evidence in favor of Nornagest's theory, but it seems like we shouldn't be postulating evil mutants without considering other possibilities.
Quirrell and Harry are both horcruxes of Voldemort, and there is a decent chance that Quirrell has guessed that this is the case by now, if he didn't always know. Quirrell thus has a very good reason to be nice to Harry...they are partially the same person.
But just how much similarity does hpmor Voldemort bear to cannon Voldemort?
Intelligence boost aside, both Harry and Quirrell have the exact same motives as canon Voldemort (power and immortality). The only difference between them is that Harry has an ethical component to his utility function - that's pretty much the only difference between Harry and Quirrell. Tom Riddle for his part is not against ethics - he just doesn't care about them. There are different varieties of evil: let's not confuse amorality with sadism.
So there is absolutely no reason why Quirrell should view Harry as an enemy, except where Harry interferes with his plans because of his morality. If Harry succeeds at all his goals, so does Quirrell (to some extent. There is still the "dominance" component of power, which is a zero sum game. It's hard to tell how much Quirrell cares about that.)
Harry's view of Quirrell is slightly more problematic. Because of Quirrell's lack of ethics constraints, Quirrell has many more options open to achieve his power/immortality goal than Harry does. So while Harry doesn't need to kill Quirrell, he does need to prevent him from achieving is goals in unethical ways.
In fact, my current prediction is that Harry will "win" by achieving Quirrell's goals ethically, thereby making it unnecessary for Quirrell to behave immorally.