You're still missing the point though. If these patents are valued so highly because of their potential as weapons (as opposed to their production potential),

You're still missing the point though. If these patents are valued so highly because of their potential as weapons (as opposed to their production potential), then this is a distortion of the market that patents are supposed to foster. This cannot be stressed enough: our patent regime is intended to foster the progress of technology. Where the market for these patents acts efficiently as as intended, the value of a patent is based strictly on its ability to allow a company to generate revenue. This is a specific condition and the threshold of quality tends to be high for patents that can genuinely enable production. The threshold needed for patents to be merely wielded as weapons is much lower. However, as you can plainly see, this does not diminish their value in the patent marketplace. Thus, the patent system in its current form encourages the misallocation of resources toward patents that do less to promote progress. Software patents encourage the worse kind of abuse, in part because the patent office is utterly incapable of properly evaluating them; you can patent nearly anything.