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Former patent examiner here. The main problem with quality is as you describe: patent examiners don't get enough time. I've written about this before on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31197809

Note that increasing fees alone won't necessarily change anything if USPTO management doesn't give examiners more time in response. For example, the USPTO charges applicants extra if they have more than a certain number of claims (20, I believe), but examiners only get 1 hour extra if there are more than that number. I once had an application with 45 claims... I estimate that I only got around 23 hours total for the first "office action" on that one (most of the work), and that includes the extra hour I got. So I got 5% more time for 125% more work!

Edit: Here's the application with 45 claims that I worked on: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190160529A1/en




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