ITA. Also, it strikes me that people living at that level of stress and misery for that length of time would have snapped at some point. Because it's not like we saw their stress and misery grow. They were pretty much at a nearly mad level right in the first chapter. And then, apparently, they were stuck like that for an entire year.

For me it was just one more false note among many. I went beyond disliking what was happening to the characters to just not buying that these characters were even real. For me, the Malfoy story stops on the Tower in HBP. (Heh. I think the series pretty much stops there, period. There's not a story line in DH that struck me as either logical or true.)