Bureaucratic systems don't help the small inventors. Bureaucratic systems, without fail, are going to benefit people who can hire lots of lawyers. People with more lawyers and deeper pockets have a structural advantage in legal fights.

Sticking to the case study at hand, the patent system set up Bell to do a bunch of basic research, patent it, then lock out small competition. I'm cool if you're cool with that, but the antitrust isn't the reason growth was enabled, it was that the patent system was functioning as expected and the government disabled it.

When they wanted growth, they revoked the patents. Which is sensible. And revoking the patents allowed faster growth. You may not like how they treated Bell and changing the rules on half way through is indeed unfair, but them's the outcomes.