> I think it's quite a bit more sinister than this. As a patent lawyer confided to me once: The most valuable patents are the obvious ones (as other folks will likely think of it themselves) and that his job is to mask the fact that a patent is in fact obvious.

That lawyer should be disbarred. Obvious inventions (from the perspective of a person having ordinary skill in the art) are per se unpatentable, and merely masking this obviousness using an obtuse independent claim spawning many dependent claims is one reason why we're in this mess. I really think that a foreseeability or causation test should be used to measure obviousness, or better still, that obviousness should be a question of fact that the jury determines.