Fortunately I was just doing a Masters so the fact that my thesis (in Material Science) ended up mostly just being some basic characterization of an alloy (grain growth, hardness, Xray crystallography) didn't really matter. It was sort of a dead-end and my thesis advisor shortly thereafter dropped research in the area to focus on his other interest where he was very successful (water ice). Things would probably have been a lot uglier had it been a PhD.