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.