It's the fact that it all just seems too pat that I am holding onto, stubbornly, because I was validated that way once before. The whole Snape-Quirrell switch of Philosopher's Stone—Snape who looks like the classic villain, and Quirrell who must be the pathetic victim, and of course their roles in the story are one hundred percent reversed from what the reader is led to believe—was what made me keep reading the series. She set up a paradigm so obvious it had to be a decoy, and then made the reader doubt their second-guesses, and then revealed the second-guess was the right one after all. And so I'm hoping she'll do it again. But my faith has been weakened in the years since . . .

a relatively unexplored (in book six) character

Everybody in Book Six was relatively unexplored!