We seem to always focus on the cost of the patent system, never the benefit. One day we will all be dead (or much older) and all of these features and patents will be freely available, described in significant detail to be reproducible, and the world will be a slightly more amazing place than it is now. If you look at all the expiring patents, many filed 20 years ago, you will find there are some neat things document…
And the patent process is not optimized to produce documents that actually help other inventors or future historians. In fact, to the contrary, as it exists within a particular narrow legal IP regime that optimizes around legal risk. This is especially the case with software patents, where the patent office incentivizes patents that use convoluted language to make an obvious process seem like a novel invention.
In other words, let's assume a future where there are no more copies of Zelda to play. If you had to choose between getting to preserve the patent on the Zelda loading screen and an actual recording of it, I'll take the recording every time. Or in a future where much of the knowledge of computer science and programming was lost, I'd rather have an archive of a set of textbooks, Stack Overflow, and Github than the entirety of the patent office's software patent documents.