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Patents are close to completely useless as a form of documentation. It's not valuable.

You may be thinking about old patents where people wrote real engineering information with real details on them that excluded non-working alternatives. Patents are not like that anymore.

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Then that sounds like a management problem, not a fundamental problem with the concept of patent lawyers and clerks which this poster claimed was a “brain drain”.

It's absolutely a patent review problem. It's probably not caused by individual clerks, as each one of them can't cause something like this alone, but it shows on their work.

Patents have an inherent tension between being as explicit as possible, and leaving enough generality so that it's not trivial to infringe. It's not supposed to be an exact recipe.

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