My professor thought that there could be paper in my thesis. Thankfully they did not insist. Work was pretty crap and useless(mostly due to happening in between versions of project/idea they were working on). But well I did graduate so that is fine for me.

I can't even imagine the horrors what papers on some Master thesis would look like. Often as there is so many graduates they are not that novel topics anyway.

Exactly.

And if you play by the spirit and not by the rules, you're fucked. Because, with masters, it takes about a year to get to the first publishable result, and about a year to publish it in a respected journal. And that's the happy pass. You might get an extra rejection, or fall into the back of the publishing queue. This could cost you three or six month easily.

The masters program in our uni is 1.5 years long.