Yeah no.

The 3D printing industry is a side effect of existing stuff developed for entirely unrelated purposes. There's nothing exciting there technically. The only reason it didn't go mainstream decades ago is patents. There was never any heavy capital investment in the underlying technologies - it's just yet another application of motion control, material handling, and CNC technology, which was never developed specifically for that, but taken into use after it was already widely adopted in other industries. Claiming it would never have existed without heavy capital investment is true, but misleading. It's like saying flexible PCBs and space blankets would never have existed without the moon landing. It's true, but now that the technology exists it's possible to use it without starting your own space program. There's plenty of money to be made and new stuff to be developed by standing on the shoulders of out-of-patent giants. 3D printing has a low cost of entry now - it didn't before. The cost of entry advantage came due to community/ecosystem based development, after the patents expired. Prior to that, it was much more expensive. This can definitely be replicated to other industries (and we're seeing it right now with computer peripherals for example).

There's an enormous number of industries with an ecosystem of specialized suppliers, some of which are tiny. The automotive industry is a prime example, where the big brands rely on thousands of tiny specialized vendors, many with single digit number of employees, for parts. The electronics industry is even more extremely so, with thousands of fabless semiconductor outfits with double digit employees, hundreds of packaging and testing companies serving those, thousands of distribution, assembly, and logistics companies on top of those, many one person or one family operations. The big foundries are what everyone knows, but none of them would exist without this. And the industry giants don't rely on patents because patents are not really safe to rely on - they mostly use trade secrets - both in the automotive and the electronics industries. You also see trade secrets as the core investment protection mechanism in aerospace, heavy industry (metallurgy, polymers, large-scale manufacturing processes) and related areas. Almost all heavily centralized industries except pharma/biotech rely on trade secrets rather than patents.

Industry-internal markets are where the bulk of the market for technology is. And reputation is critically important there. You definitely see large companies attempt to break into these ecosystem based markets and fail commercially because they don't give a shit about their customers, and smaller outfits do. And there's certainly aversion to dealing with litigation-trigger-happy outfits. I see a whole lot of migration away from products after Oracle acquisitions for example.

And fuck the idea that no innovative companies would exist without patents. There's endless companies that don't have patents, and exist, and take investment. And there's countless instances of companies that do have patents being attacked by megacorps who want to take their stuff, and of course the megacorp almost always gets away with it because they have the bigger guns, and can spend years in litigation until the victim folds and they can buy their assets at pennies to the dollar. Patents have never been adequate protection for a small company. They mostly exist to justify investment, rather than to reduce risk.

I don't see a way to reform patents that makes them a net gain to humanity. I see them doing a whole lot of damage now. I don't see a moral justification for this to go on.