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.