Has anyone read back their disseratition months/years later and thought "that's not half bad!! No idea how I wrote that"?

I spent a month writing 3 paragraphs for my epistomology discussion and I thought it was genius, one of my supervisors read it and said (dead pan) "irrelevant, irrelevant - mmm third paragraph is good". I was gutted but I kept those 3 paragraphs in a seperate document and whip them out for a read every now and again!!!

Wow, it must be something about epistemology sections! At my last annual review, one of the reviewers questioned my whole chapter that includes epistemology, as he said it doesn't relate 'directly to the data'. However, I'm leaving the chapter in for now, as I think the issue might have been having quants reviewers for a mainly qualitative thesis, and I have heard that other qualitative people have been strongly encouraged to include reflective pieces on epistemology and so on. Feels like a huge gamble going against the advice of reviewers though, and I will be gutted too if the end result is that I need to lose this work!

I had situation when I took same dissertation to my supervisor twice (!) and the first time he said: "Not good. Change it". But when I showed him the same the second time he said: "Mmm... That's good. Well done." :)

I had almost the same experience too! It almost made me cry. I was working really hard on that chapter and my supervisor didn't like it at all but the other chapter I didn't like at all was received with a praise. It was so stupid! Argh!