An issue with that, it seems, is it wouldn't decrease the barrier to applying for a patent. It is my understanding that patents were invented to help smaller op

An issue with that, it seems, is it wouldn't decrease the barrier to applying for a patent. It is my understanding that patents were invented to help smaller operations keep hold of their designs while allowing bigger operations to release their innovations rather than keeping them completely shrouded. Neither of these tenets are upheld anymore. Large companies use patents as a bully mechanism and also as a preventative/precedent mechanism to patent things long before, if ever, incorporating them into actual products. They just use patents to land grab. Patents today are highly skewed towards large, rich corporations who can afford the lawyers to create and then protect them. Meanwhile, smaller companies are screwed as it is very expensive to create and protect patents, and there's basically nothing a small company can do if a large corporation just up and copies a patented thing. In general, the patent system is completely broken at this point. It only benefits large and mega corporations, and foreign countries ignore it anyway. So it just is harming the overall ecosystem.