Now that all of the tech companies have invested billions in them and would logically want to protect their investment and competitive advantage, I don't ever see it ending (since of course corps control government). If we're lucky someone will get an iPhone banned in the US and then all hell will break loose.

The drawings are irrelevant; It's always and only about the claims.

i) I'm not familiar with how Pinterest works, so I'm no help there.

ii) they're describing essentially any annotation of content (including a link to content), provided the conditional presentation of that annotation happens on the client side.

iii) Patents are granted to inventions comprising all the elements of their claims. Reducing things to their 'core' is a habit of engineers that hampers understanding of the patent system.

The only things that are relevant as prior art, are those that contain all the elements.

A CMS that contained annotations along with content is not prior art for Claim 1 of the '362 patent, if it did conditional rendering based on that annotation on the server. As Claim 1 includes sending an applet, template and data to the client, to handle the conditional presentation.

If a given implementation doesn't send an applet, it wouldn't count as prior art if it came before, and it wouldn't infringe if it came after.