I'm sure they are rare among startup founders, but not rare in the wider realm. But it is not the fault of the patent system that people don't read them.

I already mentioned one benefit that doesn't require reading the patents, and that is there is less incentive to obfuscate designs or lock down products.

Secondly, for situations where there is a major break thru, patents give companies caught flat footed a chance to come up to speed by reading the details of the invention so that they can then extend it.

I don't, for a second, doubt that many engineers in Google and Samsung have read these Apple patents, for instance. Of course the official policy is that they don't, and they will never admit it in court (they'll never let the people who did read them testify) but the level of industrial espionage that these companies engage in is such that it seems exceedingly unlikely they wouldn't read freely available publications designed to reveal these inventions.

But that is also the purpose of the patent system.

Where things are broken here is that Google feels they can get away with infringing because in the past court cases have been long time coming and relatively weak in their impact. So, google made the calculated decisions to simply violate the patents.