The down side is your peer community then has to sift through an enormous amount of mediocrity...this idea of quantity leading to quality is beneficial for the creator's development, but as seen say in electronic music today. There is a proliferation of mediocre music in such abundance no one would ever be able to listen to it all. Sure it'll lead to eventual gems as skills increase but will we ever find them in the mountainous waves of creation being churned out in increasing amounts? As far as coding should developers produce more and more code for the public as a learning tool for themselves or wait and develop adequate skills that don't require extra work to fix later?
As a developer there's no penalty to publishing bad code that you wrote to learn something. As you said yourself, mediocrity is largely ignored. You also can't be your own judge in deciding if your work is progressing from mediocre to good, so don't wait to publish until you know your work is "adequate" because you won't know it's adequate until it's been published and judged by the community.
