[bkcooper]

Good comment. My addendum to follow is not directed to you, but to non-scientific readership.

Yea, it's boring for professor on the thesis committee to read, but this sort of stuff is very valuable for students and postdocs, who often struggle to reproduce poorly-documented results from other labs.

There's both absolute and relative poor documentation. The brevity of most scientific publishing (coupled with the lack of any sort of external incentive for clarity, as you point out) means that even papers that are good, by the standard of scientific papers, can be a real bear to turn into working examples. I personally feel that a lot of what makes various labs good is knowledge of the things that aren't going into the papers. A dissertation, with (potentially) a lot more room to go into details, can serve both as a source of this information for external readers, as well as a convenient internal reference for people in the lab who need to dig up some details of their prehistory.

edit: to clarify, my perspective on this is coming from physics. In other fields, there's more of an emphasis on explicit protocols and "methods sections" that presumably help with this sort of thing.