Agreed, the thread highlights some decent implementation issues but largely misses the design problems, both ones that were present in the whitepaper but fixed and ones that are still with us today.
Would you be willing to expand on some of the errors in the white paper? I’m admittedly not too familiar with the whitepaper (only skimmed it), but some of the other errors mentioned in this thread (for example, not including accumulated work of a chain in consensus calculations and only considering chain length) are pretty interesting.
The "freeing up disk space using Merkle trees" section doesn't make much sense. The Merkle tree structure turned out to be useful for other purposes but reducing disk usage wasn't one of them.