Warning: As per the official spoiler policy, the following discussion may contain unmarked spoilers for up to the current chapter of the Methods of Rationality. Proceed at your own risk.
Assume HPMOR was written by a super-intelligence implementing the CEV of Eliezer Yudkowsky and assorted literary critics. What would it have written differently?
... is what I want to know, but that's hard to answer. So here's an easier question:
In what ways do you think Eliezer's characterisations/world-building/plot-fu are sub-optimal? <optional> How could they be made less sub-optimal? </optional>
(My own ideas are in the comments.)
To put it another way... Assume a group of intrepid fanfic writers in the late 2020s are planning to write a reboot. What parts of Eliezer's story do you think they should tweak?
And just to make sure we're all on the same page: Eliezer isn't going to go back and change anything he's written to bring it in line with anything suggested here. This is purely an "Ah, just consider the possibilities!" thread.
... which means that we can safely suggest drastic rewrites encompassing 30 chapters or something. Or change fundamental facts about the world.
(Exercise due restraint on this one. Getting rid of the Ministry/the Noble Houses/blood purism would probably turn the story into something completely different; this isn't what we're trying to do here.)
With that, let the nit-picking begin!!
I assumed that ~ 50% of wizarding adults were employed by the Ministry alone. Sounds just like the pointless bureaucracy you'd expect wizards to create.
Commerce, yes. That's much more difficult to explain. Even more difficult to explain is the existence of specialised journals like Transfiguration Weekly. You'd need a European wizarding population of ~ a million at the very least. (And I'm probably underestimating.)
More importantly, how do you extrapolate from the class sizes? How are different age groups distributed in the population? (Not knowing the math sucks.)
ETA:
In Deathly Hallows, the Ministry made it mandatory for every wizarding child of school-going age to attend Hogwarts. IIRC, Lupin noted at the time that "Parents could always educate their children at home if they wished." Didn't say anything about other magical schools.
We probably shouldn't leap to the assumption that Transfiguration Weekly is a peer-reviewed journal with a large staff publishing results from multiple large laboratories. For all we know it's churned out in a basement by an amateur enthusiast, is only eight pages long on a good week and mostly consists of photographs of people's cats transfigured into household objects.