Who cares-- it's not like anybody reads dissertations. :) My dissertation was composed of several papers which were each published in peer-reviewed journals, s

Who cares-- it's not like anybody reads dissertations. :) My dissertation was composed of several papers which were each published in peer-reviewed journals, so the last unfinished bit just had a lot of "future directions" and became a different grad student's paper (e.g. I passed on the end of the project to someone else to finish and publish), as I recall.