I have always wondered why anyone would hire Gilderoy Lockhart, and then I started working in international schools. It makes perfect sense because, when in need, they hire absolutely anyone without an actual care for their abilities or expertise. The number of people I have met who've been hired into schools, even though they have massively problematic histories, is absurd. It's scary.

The only benefit of Lockhart: Snape's appearances in the novel decrease in order to show how incapable Lockhart is. Snape appears almost randomly to make a student miserable, still making me wonder why anyone at Hogwarts would've ever kept him around since he hates approximately 75% of his students so much.

Regarding Lockhart: If he was the only available candidate for the job, I would've found ways to have my teachers working together and restructuring the whole approach to schooling. They're a wizarding school, so why is everything so blatantly the same as the real world? It's so boring, uncreative, and just doesn't do anything at all to make people question things beyond the common issues of schools.

One of the things I would've liked to have seen was more focus on the Malfoys (less so Draco, more so Lucius); Dobby's appearances, as a stand-alone text, feel weird and out of place. He feels superfluous to the story, only acting as random events to Harry. It might set things up later, but it's pretty unimportant and tedious here. Like, if it's setting something up for later, the reader doesn't need to be bludgeoned with it happening; the author can just draw your attention to the background or prompt you to remember something at a later date.