Yes, I love the Harry Potter series, but quidditch is badly designed. In her attempt to give Harry a good opportunity to shine, Rowling made all players almost irrelevant except for one player in each team. I think Rowling belatedly realized this, and made an effort to show a match where the seeker doesn't win the game (even though that requires the rest of the teams to be ridiculously mismatched, so that a huge difference in goals can be accumulated).

The fact that a match can last from a few seconds to months is also a bad thing. Imagine paying to see the World Cup final and it's over in ten seconds. Or imagine paying to see it and having to leave because it just doesn't end and you have a life and work to go back to.

The previous problems could have been avoided with some slight tinkering with the rules. But there's another, more philosophical problem: quidditch is basically two different games going on at the same time: the chasers and goalkeepers playing one game, and the seekers playing a different one. That's not how a good team sport is designed: you want to have all your team cooperating and working together, not just a couple of them doing their own thing.

"So let me get this straight," Harry said as it seemed that Ron's explanation (with associated hand gestures) was winding down. "Catching the Snitch is worth one hundred and fifty points? "

"Yeah -"

"How many ten-point goals does one side usually score not counting the Snitch?"

"Um, maybe fifteen or twenty in professional games -"

"That's just wrong. That violates every possible rule of game design. Look, the rest of this game sounds like it might make sense, sort of, for a sport I mean, but you're basically saying that catching the Snitch overwhelms almost any ordinary point spread. The two Seekers are up there flying around looking for the Snitch and usually not interacting with anyone else, spotting the Snitch first is going to be mostly luck -"

"It's not luck!" protested Ron. "You've got to keep your eyes moving in the right pattern -"

"That's not interactive, there's no back-and-forth with the other player and how much fun is it to watch someone incredibly good at moving their eyes? And then whichever Seeker gets lucky swoops in and grabs the Snitch and makes everyone else's work moot. It's like someone took a real game and grafted on this pointless extra position so that you could be the Most Important Player without needing to really get involved or learn the rest of it. Who was the first Seeker, the King's idiot son who wanted to play Quidditch but couldn't understand the rules?" Actually, now that Harry thought about it, that seemed like a surprisingly good hypothesis. Put him on a broomstick and tell him to catch the shiny thing...

Ron's face pulled into a scowl. "If you don't like Quidditch, you don't have to make fun of it!"

"If you can't criticise, you can't optimise. I'm suggesting how to improve the game. And it's very simple. Get rid of the Snitch."

"They won't change the game just 'cause you say so!"

"I am the Boy-Who-Lived, you know. People will listen to me. And maybe if I can persuade them to change the game at Hogwarts, the innovation will spread."

A look of absolute horror was spreading over Ron's face. "But, but if you get rid of the Snitch, how will anyone know when the game ends?"

"Buy... a... clock. It would be a lot fairer than having the game sometimes end after ten minutes and sometimes not end for hours, and the schedule would be a lot more predictable for the spectators, too." Harry sighed.

• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

thats the point, to make it seem a bit whacky like all magic

It’s kind of a reflection of Harry’s character as the chosen one. Apart from everyone else, and the Most Important. I feel like she was playing with the trope.