Is it OK to have a PhD thesis with shortcomings and inaccuracies?

I'll have to define this blog entry as a 'guest posting' as I have written almost nothing of what appears below. What is not mine will appear in italics and in black.

A few days ago, someone asked the question "Is it OK to have a PhD thesis with shortcomings and inaccuracies?" on the Academia Stack Exchange, beginning with the statement "I recently defended my PhD thesis and was awarded a pass with some minor corrections. I am due to submit the final version of my thesis very soon." Hopefully I will soon be in the same position (the latest news is that the external examiner has suggested a few dates in July).

The best answer was The thesis is a "good" one if you have passed and will be awarded your degree. Don't overthink it. You have learned something from producing it that you can leverage into future work. That is, in lots of ways, a big advantage. If your advisor is also happy and wants to work with you on any future extension, you have a positive outcome, if not a perfect one. On the basis of this answer, someone commented People forget that a PhD is a 'learning degree'. Too often, completion is treated as the end, when really it is only just the beginning. If you learned something and can express that you know how or why errors occurred and what they mean for your work, then you have proved you justify being awarded your PhD. A PhD is about the process, not the end result.

Back to me: there is a huge difference between the academic and lay understandings of a doctoral degree. A lay person believes that a doctorate shows how clever a person is, and that the doctorate discovered new knowledge (that might have been true once). The academic understanding is that the degree is an apprenticeship in performing research; it is unlikely in these days that anything startling new will arise from a doctoral thesis, but it is a good base from which to start further research.