I'm not saying that 'essential' means 'obvious' in any official sense, rather that they generally cover solutions that experts in the field would come to if att

I'm not saying that 'essential' means 'obvious' in any official sense, rather that they generally cover solutions that experts in the field would come to if attempting to solve the problem. I struggle to see how the patent office could ever uphold the requirement of inobviousness, how could they possibly have expert level domain knowledge across all domains? So the patents get granted, contextually obvious or not. I should stop typing while I'm still vaguely on topic, before I start ranting about patent thickets and wilful infringement.