Pardon me for butting in but...
Interesting take, but I think we will have to agree to disagree.
- smartening=hope is not consistent with your third point that intelligence is not directly proportional to happiness.
I don't think so. The hope implied, if matweller is saying what I think he is, is more general than mere happiness. The achievement of a temporary "cure" gives hope that a more stable (if less extreme) version may be achievable. It may not result in happiness for the intellectually challenged but it should allow them to function / fit in more completely in an ever-more-technological society. In doing so, it might also remove them from being targets of abuse, which would be a good thing for wider society regardless of whether the victims are even aware of the abuse. It's a hope for the fictional society, rather than our real lives, but at the time it was written the general feeling was that such things would become reality as science and technology advanced.
- I would hope that <insert status of choice here> is unrelated to happiness is so self-evident that it doesn't need a story to point it out.
Really? Well, I suppose you do say you'd "hope", not "expect", but it seems to me that this is very far from self-evident to a LOT of people!
- The lesson that there is always a price even if you aren't the one paying it should also be very obvious.
Again, look around and see how often "should be" resolves to "is".
- I don't agree that the way things transpired in the story (not just the ending) were any more realistic that a trite Disney product.
Perhaps your life experience really is very different from mine, then.
My biggest problem with this story is that it presents all of these obvious "truths" as if it were revealing something that we didn't already know, but makes no effort in proposing possible solutions or ways of dealing with them. In my opinion, that makes this story trite and simplistic, like a young kid so full of themselves because they have discovered something they think is really big, but everyone else already knows.
Sir, if you require all your stories to provide viable solutions to the human condition then I fear you will dislike most of the field!
But that's just me. Like I said. I think we'll have to agree to disagree.
And I trust you'll allow me to disagree, too