I agree we need fewer, better patents. But triviality is orthogonal to obviousness. As I said above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7162049) the iPhone UI patents are downright trivial to implement, but were they obvious before Jobs asked "How do we make smartphone touchscreens not suck"? Another related issue in the same comment is, identifying the problem itself is often the hard part, but the solution may be trivial.
We certainly need to fix things, but these are complex issues.
We certainly need to fix things, but these are complex issues.