system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Cutting my PhD thesis in half

I can't avoid the fact that the last two thirds of my Computer Science PhD thesis is much stronger than my first third. 

The first two years of my studies were devoted to following dead end routes and discussing these dead ends forms about 25,000 words of a 75,000 word thesis. In that section there's a lot of explanation that's mostly in service of exposition for the final part, with no real satisfying outcomes.

I have a feeling that in my viva I'm going to be defending those 25,000 words non-stop and I really don't want to do that. Instead I was thinking that I might be able to get away with just not mentioning my early work. All I have to do is re-frame the latter half of the work.

I haven't spoken to my supervisor about this yet as I haven't quite decided how to approach the subject. He did say that my thesis was like a PhD and a half though the other day.

So does anyone on AskAcademia have any advice or experiences they would like to share?
gpt
I tried to put this type of material in several appendices so that others could read about the unproductive and half-explored leads, if they wished, without letting this material detract from the main message.