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Okay, so what I was pointing at is that character matters, IRL, and most of the magical feats you call "gimmicks" are a case of character mattering in HP magic as well.
He wins in Chamber of Secrets because of his faith in Dumbledore (summoning Fawkes) and his bravery (allowing him to pull the sword out of the hat) - and while you claim that Hermione's just as brave as he is, the very fact that you also lament his foolhardiness puts the lie to that, because foolhardiness literally is just excessive bravery. He escapes in Goblet of Fire because of his strong will (Priori Incantatem wouldn't have saved him if Voldemort had managed to make Harry's wand reverse itself instead), and to some extent his ability to be a fair winner with Cedric. He's able to kill the Horcrux and come back for much the same reasons as in CoS.
And aside from magic being character-based, his character is also more mundanely what let him run the DA in Order of the Phoenix; Hermione couldn't have done that, because the sort of person who trusts no-one and springs surprise Dark Arts on allies is not the sort of person people follow. As noted in Leaders of Men, you want someone who makes Hermione's decisions and has Harry's character, but someone with Harry's character doesn't make Hermione's decisions.
You might disagree with the character traits Harry is rewarded for actually being good. You might not like, on a stylistic level, character mattering like this. (I'm a Hermione fan too!) But they're not "pure gimmicks"; there is a theme going on here, much the same theme that's hammered in time and again that it's choices, not abilities, that make Voldemort a bad guy.
EDIT: Another Zvi post; will quote the relevant parts this time.
As for your examples, Harry pulled the sword not based on his grit, his will or anything like that. He matched the criteria of "Gryffindor in need" and it was pulled. It could have been Ron or Hermione or even Neville if he was there, the result is the same. In fact Neville pulled that sword later in the books. As for Priori Incantatem it also not works. It is established in the book lore that Harry didn't know what Priori Incantatem was, he didn't plan for it, and he didn't trigger it intentionally. He cast a his expiliarmus gimmick out of desperation, and the universe stepped in with a technical glitch of shared cores that saved his life. Harry was not a leader contesting enemy general, he was a drowning person randomly getting ahold of floating beam that fate put there. Relying on your opponent's gun jamming is not a display of heroic military leadership. There was not contest of will like Achilles vs Hector.
The whole DA is laughable. People followed him because he was a celebrity and Harry was very self aware of how unprepared he was for the role. Heck, they had to persuade him to do it. At the beginning of the book Harry as usual was his whiney self, lacking any internal agency, motivation, need for glory or revenge. He was as usual reluctant moron manipulated into a situation well above his head by Hermione who strategized about threat Ministry of Magic posed, who ultimately came up with the idea of DA as a valid strategy, called the first meeting, lied to people and used that lie and emotional manipulation to make Harry take the role as a figurehead. And Harry was right, he was just a brand ambassador and way of his league, Hermione was CEO and leader. She ran the operation smoothly from communications through magic artifacts she created, OpSec including Sneak Jinx that caught defectors, member vetting, base establishment etc. She did it all. Furthermore, Harry's lack of strategic caution is exactly what doomed the DA—he failed to master Occlumency, fell for Voldemort’s blatant psychic trap, and led his friends into a catastrophic ambush at the Ministry of Magic.
I already said that these Zvi posts do not work here. We have access to Harry's internal monologue, we have perfect information of lore, actions of villains and allies. There are no unknown unknowns, no leadership mystery. We can evaluate everything coldly based on basic criteria. Be it hero journey, leadership and managerial skills as with Kotler Management Matrix or whatever.
It is not what I like or dislike, I actually liked the books but I do consider Harry Potter as a subversion of hero. He is dumb, moronic Chosen one, who has to rely on systems, his professors, more capable people and dumb luck to navigate situation that is well over his head from start to finish - even his win against Voldemort is quirk of the Elder wand, a convoluted license agreements/EULA failure, that was tracked internally by the wand, and who nobody was really aware of including Voldemort and Potter. It is one of the most anticlimactic defeats out there, a repeat of wand glitch from cemetery scene and perfect encapsulation of Potter's status as "the hero who lucked out" and lived. He is less of a protagonist and more of a vessel through which we can watch prearranged events unfold - events orchestrated by real heroes. I used this comparison elsewhere - at best he is Dr. Watson to Sherlock Holmes of Hermione, Dumbledore, Snape and rest of the cast. An admirable, brave and likeable character, but no hero of the story.
I specifically consider Potter as subversion of hero, because he is antithesis of what boys and men usually wanted to see for millennia. They want to see Achilles and Beowulf. They want to be Wyatt Erp or Conan The Barbarian - not a moron like Potter, who is constantly talked down, whines and more importantly lacks almost any agency over his actions. Actually correction, there is one area where he really deserves his accolades - his quidditch success. There was no Dumbledore manipulating the snitch, no mommy blood navigating him toward a goal or defensive play. It was all result of his talent, training and dedication. Moreover Potter actually has internal motivation to become a good player and be famous not for his scar but for something that he has control over. If this was a story of how Potter became the best Quidditch player of his generation, it would be a fine boy story along the lines of Karate Kid or Inazuma Eleven. But it was not meant to be, Potter will be remembered as the boy who lived.
Um, yes, there is a contest of wills.
Like, seriously, go reread the scene. They cast, the effect goes off, and they're stuck in a contest of wills with beads of light moving between them. Harry forces the beads into Voldemort's wand, and it makes ghosts of the most recent people Voldemort killed, who then harass Voldemort long enough for Harry to get away (the Death Eaters are also IIRC thrown off-balance by seeing Voldemort lose at anything). If Harry hadn't won the contest of wills, he would not have been able to get away and Voldemort or a Death Eater would have killed him. If Harry hadn't befriended Cedric, Cedric's ghost would have been less willing to go along with it.
No, it wasn't. The DA turned out to be critical. There are pitched battles at the end of HBP and DH in which the Hogwarts students are the main fighting force. The DA built camaraderie and at least a decent chain of command; you need that for effective cohesion under fire and without that experience they'd likely have broken and been slaughtered.
You keep noting that Harry is lousy at planning. Sure, he's lousy at it. So is the coach Leaders of Men is about. Harry's strength is not his brains; it's his character. Yes, Harry without Hermione fails. But Hermione without Harry also fails. Character matters, both mundanely and, in HP, magically. This is the whole point of Leaders of Men, which you seem to have missed. Planning helps. It is not the only thing that helps. Unity and morale help. Emotional resonance helps. Harry's open defiance of Umbridge, the very thing you lambast him for, is key to the DA working; he is visibly and expensively committed to the cause, and people want to live up to that.
It is not true contest of wills in terms of planning, execution etc. The whole thing is manufactured by cosmic accident with some sparks flying around, some ghosts chiming in and so forth. By the same account Potter possesses "strong will" when he braves through quidditch injury etc. And I am not saying that he is not brave and stubborn, but at best he is weak version Dr. Watson from Sherlock Holmes - a brave veteran, fine gentlemen and in some ways more suited for tasks than Holmes. But he is not the hero.
Potter lacks even the basic motivation and prerequisite of being a leader. He literally had to be tricked to "lead" DA that was organized, equipped and constructed by Hermione. It goes beyond just planning. You are constantly eluding to Leaders of Men. I have to use the same argument - we are not talking about Putin or Trump where we can speculate about invisible variables and mystical juice of leadership. We literally have access to internal monologue and all circumstances of the characters in the books. And we see that Potter is a moron.
Uhhhh... what? Outplanning each other is a contest of wits, not wills. Yes, absolutely, will is determination.
This... seems like a non sequitur? Running logistics is the quartermaster's job, not the leader's. The leader's job is to get everyone pointed in the same direction and giving 110%. Harry is hilariously better at that than Hermione.
I specifically used contest of heroes like Achilles and Hector. Their will is not about some specific scene where Achilles and Hector bash their shields in contest of who pushes harder - until Hector gets distracted and slips on a banana peel proving his inferior will. It is everything that surrounds it, how their motivations and actions brought them in front of the walls of Troy, how their preparations pan out and what impact it will have on the war.
Harry Potter is nowhere near that, he was dragged there literally against his agency, with no preparation and no plan - in fact he was the one manipulated throughout everything like a puppet by shadowy play of Voldermort's spies against Dumbledore and his allies from behind. From Voldemort gathering intelligence from ministry employee, through mysterious evasion of age restriction to activation of portkey; it was all orchestrated play. Potter could have been a wooden puppet that exploded in Voldemort face when he used a flawed wand. I am not sure if you get what I want to say.
It was not just logistics. Hermione identified the threat. She strategized and came up with a plan of DA. She selected and vetted its members. On top of that she handled logistics, OpSec and everything. She even hired local celebrity as Brand ambassador and mascot in form of Potter. When there is any decision to be made about what to do next, Potter immediately defers to Hermione ranging from where to meet, what are supposed to be terms in contract - he literally just signs on the dotted line without even knowing that it is hexed. He lacks any knowledge about anything, because he ultimately does not matter as he is not the one making decisions - Hermione is.
This lack of decision making goes even beyond that. As an example, when the ministry falls, Potter does not strategize, select best course of action or anything like that. Hermione just grabs him and Ron without asking, and teleports them into pre-prepared backup base she arranged and of which Potter did not even have a clue about. What a masterful Leader of Men. And by the way, Hermione could do that, because of course she is apparition genius and knows the spell to such a level that she is certified teleporter.
Moreover Potter himself agrees with me here, he explicitly says that he is just an instructor and even gets aggressive if praised, admitting that he only lives thanks to dumb luck and immense help. Of course his bursts of rage, self-pitying etc. have to be managed by Hermione before impacting morale. Hermione shows excellent interpersonal and conflict resolution skills of true leader, managing such an unstable asset in her team by reframing his behavior as modesty. We have access to his internal monologue and we know exactly what happened, why it happened, who made decision and everything. There is no leadership mystery to uncover here.
As much as I like Harry Potter, your observations are largely correct and point to something I have observed in all of Rowling's writing, including her adult novels, which is that she is a woman and she writes men, well, like a woman. Which means she has a theoretical understanding of manly virtues and an abstract appreciation of manhood, but only through a feminist lens. She loves Harry, but she loves him like a son. Hermione is basically her alter ego on the page. She would not have noticed all the tensions you point out, in which she makes her girl supporting character be not just smart, but basically the planner and decision maker while Harry is just sort of there to show up and play hero. Because in her conception, you don't really need (or necessarily want) men to be in charge, you just want them to do the brave heavy lifting. Certainly Harry taking command and Hermione deferring to him would have been... uncomfortable for her.
This is apparent in her Cormoran Strike novels as well. Cormoran is a big tough former special forces soldier, but over the course of the series he's increasingly there to be protective muscle while Robin makes decisions.
Sure, there is a lot of that. Just compare how Harry's mother Lily and her love is key to everything and protects him and the whole Hogwarts up until the end, while his father is idolized, then portrayed as arrogant bully in some memories never to have any other impact on the story, being replaced by stepfathers such as Dumbledore, Black etc. Also Voldemort is turned villain of course because of his father, the same for Malfoy, Barty Crouch. The same for Snape, he also is turned to Death Eaters due to his abusive father.
So if mother is bad, father is even worse and probably the reason everything turns to shit. If father is good, it has to be reflection of his wife who tamed him or somehow corrected him, be it Harry's father or even Arthur Weasley. I agree, it is fundamentally feminist telling of a story, it has nothing to do with ancient sagas of male heroes, not to even talk about modern 20th century counterparts I mentioned before, be it Tolkiens heroes, Conan or even comic book heroes such as Batman or Superman who all had phenomenal fathers.
Also I do not want to put it just on Rowling being a woman. Men as authors are as prone to this type of characterization, need to introduce these themes as women are. In fact, reading some pure women stories is sometimes even liberating, as it at least makes sense in terms of virtues and the whole story.
Did you miss the bit where they explicitly say that he was a bit of a prat, but very charismatic, and then he matured a bit and was admired by all?
Harry is an orphan. It's hard to parent from beyond the grave.
Voldemort is turned villain by his mother, with it implied that her using magical rape on her lover combined with her weak abandonment of her child caused Voldemort to be born without the ability to love. Voldemort murdered his father out of disappointment with his legacy, not because his father was a bad man (he wasn't very nice but that's because Rowling has trouble with aristocrats, not men).
I'm deeply non-feminist but even then you seem to me to have this very shallow idea of what men are allowed to be and do, and what constitutes character and virtue. That might be a feminist trope but even broken clocks are right twice a day.
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