Why Dissertation Writing is SO MUCH BETTER than Paper Writing

Let me count the ways!

1. There's no word, space, character, or figure limit!!  I can take up as much space as I need or want to prove my point.
2. Figures can be as big as I want them to be!  A full page if that's what makes it easily viewed!  There's no cramming what works best as 6 figures into Figure 1a-c.  No squishing what I'd normally fill an entire power point slide with into 2 inches by 3 inches.
3. No selectively referencing or citing the review articles in order not to take up precious space on references.  I can include as many references as I see fit!
4. Similarly, there are no reviewers to be offended that I didn't include their obscure, only sorta related paper!  My dissertation will be read by my advisor and a handful of other faculty from my department - not other scientists who also work in my field, very narrowly defined.  I'm sure my committee will have comments, some of which will be things to add, but they're unlikely to be references, and they're not going to be put out by the omission.  (Sidenote, "put out" is a great expression.)
5. I am the sole author.  No waiting for a collaborator to write something, no trying to merge pieces written by multiple people into a fluid document, no trying to figure out how to tell one coherent story with data from like 5 different people!
6. When I finish a chapter, rather than being particularly excited to go celebrate (remember, just about everything is worthy of a beer in grad school!), I'm super motivated to open a new Word document and crank out another chapter RIGHT NOW.  This may sound really weird, but one of my former labmates actually assured me this was quite normal.  And I'm sure that when I finish the last chapter draft and/or the whole thing that there will be much celebrating.  When I finish a draft of a paper (not to mention throughout the entire process) I just want to shoot myself.
7. The margins and formatting requirements set forth by the graduate college (1.5" margins on 2 of 4 sides, double spaced, 12 pt font) are so ridiculously spacious that you can feel like you've got a ton done in no time flat!  Seriously, I just opened a new document to start another chapter, set up the formatting, inserted the section headings, figures, and captions (that I had to have done for my 6 month meeting), and BOOM!  I've got seven pages already!  (Sidenote, no wonder these things wind up being 300+ pages so often.)

Yeah, there are days when dissertation writing is painfully boring and tedious.  And there are definitely days I don't want to do it.  But yeah, you're going to have a hard time convincing me that dissertation writing isn't WAY better than paper writing.