Post-mortem:

The "No" campaign was crap, but then it always was going to be. Arguing for the status quo is always going to be hard.

However, dull but worthy won out, and here's why:

Salmond built the "Yes" campaign on wishful thinking.

Now, it's arguable whether the concomitant deceit was deliberate, or the result of genuine delusion, but the facts are plain: Salmond literally denied reality on the following absolutely 100% mission-critical points:

* He stated that there would be a currency union, and continued to do so after every major English political party, and the governor of the Bank of England said there would not

* He stated that Scotland would continue as an EU member state, and continued to do so after a veritable cavalcade of authorities on the matter said that Scotland would have to apply to join and membership would depend on meeting the necessary Article 48 criteria (even in a perfect world, that's a grindingly slow process. You might be able to wrap it up inside a decade. Turkey applied in 1987, and they're still not in.)

* He massively overstated the amount of money that would be available from oil revenues, and continued to do so when impartial analysts said "uh, no, your guys have overstated the numbers, and they've been doing that for quite a while"

And so on. It didn't help that the SNP costings for the actual split were ludicrously low.

Scots aren't stupid.