I've worked on processing submissions for this project. Honestly, it probably ends up just costing them more to do this program, which is mostly just a paid PR activity. The overwhelming majority of submissions, and I mean like 99%, are either not prior art in the sense of patent law or were already retrieved by the law firm on the case.

I have a friend who works for the city and invented a brilliant system to remove weed from pebble driveways, without using weed killers. They wrote an article in the local paper, and he was even awarded by the mayor.

Several people recommended to him to patent his system, and he contacted a patent lawyer to do just that.
The lawyer praised his idea, and stated he could make the paperwork to get the patent, for the small fee of some insane amount.
Luckily he pulled out, and did not go forward.

It turns out that his idea was already in production in Germany. The money to the patent lawyer would have been a complete waste.

The moral of the story is, that the only sure winners on patents, are the lawyers.

Edit PS:
Another story, a guy had some patents he found out were being used by a really big company.
He contacted the company to make an agreement on the use of his patents, and the response he got back was basically: "Sue us".
Those big companies have lawyers on their pay role, patent cases are insanely expensive, in part because patent lawyers are among the most expensive, and it's near impossible to predict the outcome of a case. His chances of even affording the case were slim, and the chance of winning even if he was obviously right were even slimmer. Because the big company will just hire "experts" to claim non violation. And the little guy can't afford to match it.

So again the patents didn't help the little guy.

Exactly, and Christ the Apple vs Samsung on Samsung copying the iPad "design" was ridiculous!
I don't know if that was what you meant, but that's what I immediately thought of.

Or things Nintendo does

The more fine-tooth details you put in it the easier it is to exploit or get exceptions. It's how you have a tax code where 10% tells you what to pay and 90% tells you how not to pay it.

But the only thing I would change would be a software patents should be dramatically shorter than hardware patents given the life cycle of software.

The patents are expiring and once they do regulators will kind of have their hand forced. Trying to mandate a solution only available through one provider is a nonstarter. And that's part of the darker side of Sawstop. He did try to have it mandated by law after companies didn't buy in. It was a very self serving move that made a lot of enemies.

If one company took it up it would have created a war in the industry. Everyone decided to play it safe with business as usual. Because companies don't care about anything other than profit.

I was channeling what Disney might suggest 😉