I salute your intention to find the silver lining but my experience reading patents is that they are hard to read. I believe this is because their job is not to convey information but rather to fulfill a legal requirement. I also believe that less restriction of these "inventions" would lead to a greater proliferation of truly useful explanations. No doubt there are exceptions but this has been my experience.
Sounds like a great opportunity for someone to make an AI that is designed to "decrypt" patents into their actual useful parts (minus the legal stuff basically)
With trade secrets, you can still independently discover them later. With patents, you have to check your own inventions on whenther they infringe patents, which is kind of ridiculous.
> companies would be obligated to wrap anything up in trade secret and never disclose anything
What in these patents would be locked away in a trade secret? They seem to be things you can figure out just by playing the game, or thinking about how it might be implemented. There's no secrets here.
