Well, Harry tried to. Big difference, IMHO.
As to all the other examples, I made mention of the UCs being allowed during the war to suggest that they may well have been allowed by the time of Deathly Hallows, as well, even if we are not told so explicitly (I just can’t remember).
I’m pretty sure that in the book, he swings his axe into a fence. The pumpkins (which are horribly painted in the sense that they look like illustrations not vegetables; why is it so hard to make a realistic looking prop pumpkin?) are a movie only thing.
Not a fence. Tree stump, maybe, or the aforementioned pumpkin. But not a fence.
Its been years since I read Prisoner of Azkaban, but at one time it was my favourite. IIRC they heard a thunk and thought that Beaky was no more. Later Harry and Hermione say McNair hit a tree stump in anger.
BTW in Deathly Hallows was’nt McNair dispatched by Hagrid? Poetic I say.
Most fantasy novels are very Eurocentric with regard to their setting and magical elements. I’ve read some with Asian or Arabian-inspired settings, but these usually stick with those settings and don’t deal with interactions between different magic-using Earth cultures.
I did once read a Mercedes Lackey novel called The Fire Rose (Wikipedia tells me its part of her Elemental Masters series, but I only read the one book) that acknowledged that Western and Eastern elemental magic made use of different elements. This wasn’t a major point, but the American heroine encountered some Chinese magic users in San Francisco and learned that instead of Earth, Fire, Water, and Air, their magic system was based on Earth, Fire, Water, Wood, and Metal. Not sure if any of the other books in the series deal with this in more detail.
This point has come up before, and the usual response is that there’s good reason to believe that Harry’s year and house are not average. Harry was born during a brutal wizard war in which many people were killed. This wouldn’t have had an effect on the number of Muggle-born wizards, but couples with at least one wizard spouse might understandably have decided it was not a good time to bring a child into the world. Whether Rowling planned it this way or not, it makes sense that the wizard birth rate would have been lower than usual during Voldemort’s reign of terror. So Harry’s cohort at Hogwarts might have been unusually small.
Since house sorting is based on the student’s personality, there’s no reason to expect a perfectly even distribution of students across the houses. It’s not clear from the books how many students in Harry’s year are in the other three houses. There might be significantly more Slytherins, etc., than there are Gryffindors.
I know it’s not scientific, but to date I am the only person I’ve ever met who admits to having been sorted into Hufflepuff by the original Harry Potter website sorting hat application back in '99 or whenever the first film came out.
Every frakking person I meet says they’re Gryffindor or Slytherin.
My estimates about school sizes were just wild-ass-guesses. There is no evidence to say that it’s 5 students of each gender for each house for each year, but nothing really saying it’s different either. Or whatever the population of Hogwarts was, if it was typical or atypical.
I really can’t imagine every single wizard family homeschooling their kids until 11. Who knows, maybe they take a “basic skills” pill instead of Skelegro for bones, use the opposite of a Pensieve.
I like to think that there are other schools and Hogwarts is just for the British/Irish/Scottish elite.
This little things aren’t even really plot holes because we have so little information to have anything contradict itself. Just little things that I read and go “hmmm, how could they not have met before??? What does book 1 Ginny do when her brothers are away?” 
Re turning the kids into Harry Potters, they anticipated (correctly) that the Death Eaters were under order tio capture Harry unharmed. The danger was for the Order Members.
They had help from a former employee at Gringotts.
It is established that the Wizarding world has radio pretty early on in the series.