Even most modern "real" (non-software) patents don't seem to be useful for actually teaching people how to implement technologies, which was one of the major purposes of requiring the disclosure.
The possible exception being in regulated industries like pharma where it's entirely possible for a drug to take 15 years to develop and test. I think healthcare and pharma probably need to be treated differently, but even there, patents don't seem to be making the world a better place, at least not in the way they were originally intended.
If you used a patent at launch system, where you could only copyright / patent something going to market, you could avoid the corner case.
It is a good practice in general. You can only patent that that you can actively push to market in a reasonable time frame (even if it is in small quantities). Under a policy like that, drugs couldn't be issued patents until after they pass the FDA, but the FDA could internally have rules against letting someone else copy a design and pass it through faster.
I guess that would make copyright law easier at the expense of bureaucracy.
