I'd wager that the overwhelming vast majority of patents are incremental ideas that all experts in the specialization are capable of producing on their own. An

I'd wager that the overwhelming vast majority of patents are incremental ideas that all experts in the specialization are capable of producing on their own. And the ones that aren't incremental are mostly just prophetic and useless to society. E.g. use VR to train surgeons or perform surgery. I bet there's many patents out there like that and if you followed them on the day they were filed you'd only kill patients.