I feel we agree far more than disagree. I'm not sure where you got the impression that I expected the supervisor to be some sort of genius or deep domain expert

I feel we agree far more than disagree. I'm not sure where you got the impression that I expected the supervisor to be some sort of genius or deep domain expert on bootloaders. I just expected them to be expert in writing theses, which includes those things you mentioned. > In that sense, I would argue that a good thesis advisor will focus on the scientific process, documentary evidence, clarity of experimental setups and tests/checks/benchmarks performed, not whether the outcome would be "great enough" to pitch as a founder to VCs. Exactly! And in this case I feel the exact opposite happened; the advisor let the student work overly fancy project with lot of buzzwords ticked and with minimal rigor; from the result I think it's is pretty obvious that way too big part of the whole project was spent on coding, and too little on those things. That's why I blamed the advisor/supervisor in my parent comment, they should have intervened at some point in the process. Of course I do realize that in practice these thesis supervisors might have gazillion students under them and minimal time allocated per student, so most likely they just weren't very involved at any stage. And academic institutions have pressure to get students to graduate which creates its own set of problems.