True and true. In some ways perhaps that’s the point. It is a game of sorts, it is business competition; businesses temporarily monopolizing business on inventions in return for disclosing them. And it makes sense that legal protections for businesses are better & easier for those businesses when they spend money on lawyers, if a little pessimistic. Unfortunately the system is somewhat motivated to try to cut out people who can’t afford lawyers.
You mentioned bad/dumb patent examiners. I’ve never worked with them and only worked with patent lawyers, and I have to say I’ve been constantly impressed with their ability to absorb, understand, and describe highly technical work in legalese (and yes the language is sometimes performative and can sound funny to engineers). Teams creating these inventions take months and years to make something patentable, and when I think about how the lawyer’s job is to understand these new inventions in a short amount of time, over and over, week after week, I feel like they have a hard job and I’m routinely surprised at how well and how quickly they understand it.