i adore harry potter, but ...

i adore harry potter, but there are things about it that bug me. maybe some of these criticisms will be answered by the 7th book, i hope so.

for one, wasn't the philosopher's/sorcerer's stone safer before harry went down in there to "save" it? he got it out of the mirror, quirrell couldn't. if harry hadn't gone down there, presumeably quirrell would have spent a lot of fruitless time nattering to himself in front of the mirror of erised, and then d'dore would have come down and caught him and been done with him. harry was wonderful and brave and all, but what he did, in the end, served no real purpose.

and i want to know how voldy got his wand back. he says to his DEs that he couldn't hold a wand after his attempt to curse baby Harry backfired. no one takes credit for getting it back to him. he gives no one credit for it, either. so will the wand deliverer be revealed in book 7, or did JKR just mess up?

another thing: If D'dore didn't really believe that the prophecy was "truth", ie, it wasn't Harry's destiny unless he chose it to be (and he says so in HPB), why did he wait so many years to reveal the prophecy to Harry?

I've long thought that prophecy thing was the weakest part of OotP, maybe the weakest part of the whole series so far. If Harry had just known the prophecy (and D'dore could have told it to him at any time, or let him stumble across it in the pensieve if he didn't want Voldy looking at him through Harry's eyes) then in essence the whole book wouldn't have happened. And, not unimportant, Sirius wouldn't have died, either.

and who cares if voldy wastes time and energy going after the prophecy? what mattered (to me, to harry) is that HARRY went after it. sirius went to the dept of mysteries to rescue harry. the prophecy had nothing to do with why sirius was there, except that it was why harry was there. if harry hadn't tried to "rescue" sirius, sirius wouldn't have died. just what voldy was banking on, really.

if instead harry had been told, say 3/4ths of the way through the book, what the prophecy was, he wouldn't have gone to the dept of mysteries that night, it wouldn't have mattered that snape stopped giving him occlumency lessons, and voldy would have spent (wasted) lots more time and energy trying to get the prophecy.

i just think it's weak.