I think Einstein's dissertation is a bad example of a dissertation that was not an immediate superstar. It was. Einstein could have taken this author's advice of stapling together his first three papers. Einstein's considerations about more precise calculations of Avogadro's Number lead directly to his novel technique(at the time!) of using Brownian motion to deduce that photons exist as particles, and not just waves. Then it only took a couple of years for that idea to morph into his famous Annus Miribilis paper On the electrodynamics of moving bodies, from which Special Relativity sprung forth. And the rest was history.
Actually, the Brownian Motion paper concerned the increasingly popular atomic theory, not photons. The photoelectric effect paper used the notion of photons, but it wasn't new and Einstein didn't really believe that photons existed. And special relativity is different from those two entirely. And all those papers were published in the same year. The same year in which he defended his thesis.
