The game theory of patents has been blindingly obvious to me for years. If you think others can independently come up with it, patent it. If you think it's utterly novel, hide it as a trade secret.
When you think of it like that, doesn't the whole edifice come crumbling down? The goal of patents was to encourage publication of new techniques. But the most valuable ones escape.
There are situations where it would be impossible to develop an utterly novel solution without publicity, namely any system that despite its complexity can be trivially reverse-engineered and anything whose value is dependent on the public availability of [expensive, privately-funded] research demonstrating how it works.
These edge cases exist; the problem is the patent system doesn't assume they're edge cases and instead seems to encompass anything and everything that can be classed as an invention (not to mention some concepts that are so vague and broad it's question whether they actually describe anything at all)
The problem with trade secrets companies are unwilling or unable to patent won't go away.
When you think of it like that, doesn't the whole edifice come crumbling down? The goal of patents was to encourage publication of new techniques. But the most valuable ones escape.