Can you recommend a good reference/source for translating legalese? I'm not sure I've ever found a good source for determining which words should be interpreted normally and which are landmines.
The ambiguity about what words mean may be part of why people assume patents are so broad. Most people know that some words and phrases, when used in a legal context, have vastly different (more specific, broader, or even completely disconnected) meanings than what you'd expect in normal writing or speech. Without knowing what those are, the safe approach is to ascribe the least favorable possible meaning to every word. "Does language X mean Y" becomes "could language X possibly be interpreted by someone who doesn't understand the material to kinda vaguely reference Y," and you get the type of broad assumptions you're lamenting here.