> long as people keep focusing solely on these "narrow victories" in order to simply maintain the broken status quo

I’m not saying drop the fight. Just to show a modicum of strategy. Turning an IPR fight into a patent debate lets those looking to quash IPR win while doing nothing for the broader debate.

What is smart tactically is doing exactly this when you oppose something: overscope so people disengage or get distracted in a juicier discussion while forgetting to send the relevant message to their elected or regulator.

On the contrary, continuously applying fresh duct tape to a fundamentally broken system allowing it to limp along allows the opponents to point to it and say "see, the system works as is" and the bias in favor of upholding the status quo wins out. By allowing things to fail, you force people to get engaged to do something to fix the problem, at which point actual change becomes possible.

Allowing important systems to fail is not without cost.

At some point, the immediate cost of fail-and-fix is lower than the total short to mid term cost of not fixing it.

The problem arises when systems are intentionally set up to fail (e.g. USPS pensions, gutting education), because those who set them on a doom course usually do so to offer a privatized "alternative" to pocket the profits.

What course of action doesn't come with a cost? Fixing things well is expensive but fixing things poorly is generally more expensive in the long run.

But the point is that what fixing something well means depends on the context. Total software re-writes are rarely a good idea for large production systems, and software isn't special in that regard.

Yeah, but we don't care about preserving the existing large production system, we explicitly want to switch to a different, more appropriate system.

> By allowing things to fail

Nothing in this context is "allowing things to fail." It's simply strengthening rightsholders' hands.

It's a failure for those who want to weaken rightsholders' hands, which presumably includes anyone who wants to see the patent system completely torn down.

The point is if you want people to act, they need to first feel the pain of inaction. If the status quo is tolerable, there is less incentive to put in the great effort necessary for reform.