On the latter point, many public university libraries also allow anyone to come in and read books, download journal articles, sometimes even ILL.
The main question in CS, imo, outside of certain capital-intensive areas (robotics, HPC), is learning styles. Do you learn better taking formal courses, having a supervisor oversee your project, having formal evaluation milestones (quals, proposal, thesis, defense)? Some people do, some don't.
I do think the process of doing research and thinking of your goal in terms of "research contribution" rather than "product" is valuable for many intelligent/curious people. I'm less sure (despite being an academic myself) that the formal academia route is the best way for everyone, though. Imo the most valuable part of academia is the interaction with a research community in an area that interests you: work on a project, collaborate with some people, submit papers to conferences, get reviewer feedback, revise things, present papers, chat at the conference banquet, get inspired with new problems or ideas, etc., etc. You don't strictly have to be an academic to do any of that, especially in CS, although a large proportion of people who do are. Some of it is just culture I think: I think a lot of people outside academia who could submit interesting conference papers just don't even have that possibility on their horizon as something they could do, or would want to do.
These are all good points that I generally agree with. It is also the case, however, that experiences do vary. For example, my supervisor was hands off to the point where I had to largely fend for myself. The quals and proposals were more things that got in the way of research rather than helped. This was the case so much that I ended up doing my proposals long after research was underway.
The thesis and defence is useful in the same way that publications are. However, even there, if you get a bad committee with political or personal axes to grind, it can be very much not that helpful. My experiences with publications are the same. I've had good rejections that help me improve the work as well as several bad rejections (from conferences where you cannot respond) where the reviewer simply did not understand the research.
In short, for some people a PhD is very hands on rather than overly formal.
The main question in CS, imo, outside of certain capital-intensive areas (robotics, HPC), is learning styles. Do you learn better taking formal courses, having a supervisor oversee your project, having formal evaluation milestones (quals, proposal, thesis, defense)? Some people do, some don't.
I do think the process of doing research and thinking of your goal in terms of "research contribution" rather than "product" is valuable for many intelligent/curious people. I'm less sure (despite being an academic myself) that the formal academia route is the best way for everyone, though. Imo the most valuable part of academia is the interaction with a research community in an area that interests you: work on a project, collaborate with some people, submit papers to conferences, get reviewer feedback, revise things, present papers, chat at the conference banquet, get inspired with new problems or ideas, etc., etc. You don't strictly have to be an academic to do any of that, especially in CS, although a large proportion of people who do are. Some of it is just culture I think: I think a lot of people outside academia who could submit interesting conference papers just don't even have that possibility on their horizon as something they could do, or would want to do.