Your comment made me grin all over! Thank you for such detailed feedback.
I'm glad you liked the OCs. They're always tricky to write, because they have the potential to annoy readers. But I'm very fond of Odile, and I enjoyed writing Adrian, partly because it was fun to matchmake Hermione with someone of her own intellectual calibre.
While I understand the reasons JKR set the final battle at Hogwarts, I always felt it undermined Voldemort's credibility as a villain. It's odd to have the Big Bad come to a school to fight a bunch of teenagers. And then, of course, I couldn't resist giving Snape a pivotal role to play in Harry's fate and the destruction of the horcruxes. It's the type of horrific but necessary act I can imagine Snape performing when no one else has the knowledge or the bollocks to do it - and it's exactly the sort of thing that Harry would be quick to hold against him.
Harry's emotions . . I wanted to stay true to the fact that Harry often doesn't "get" things. He's not an analytical bloke. Even after his feelings for Snape start to change, I expect he'd get stuck in-between, confusing love and hate, for a very long time. Hating Snape has been one of the few constants in Harry's life, and he'd be reluctant to give it up. Also, yeah, he has a lot of anger and no place to go with it.
Woohoo, you liked the smut! I've never written graphic sex scenes before, and sure enough, they're just as hard to write as everything else. While keeping it all in character, of course. And I wanted it raw.
I packed in an awful lot at the end, so I'm relieved that the scene in the burning house and Severus's sacrifice moved you. I did worry that too much was happening and the emotional impact would be lost. Then, I have a preference for open-ended fics, so at the last I decided to leave a few things up to the reader.
I'm thrilled that you enjoyed being sucked into this world and that you followed the emotions so closely. Thank you very much for this long, lovely, thoughtful review.