Except that people who have some problem they really want solved are usually willing to spend money to figure out how to solve it.

Driving investment money toward the pursuit of payouts from monopoly production rights actually allows people to sit on better ideas for decades, or worse to plan out propaganda campaigns to get a product with an expiring patent choked off the market while they roll out the newly patented product.

I'm pretty sure expiring patents on refrigerants were the entire source of the "CFCs damaging the ozone" campaign which as far as I can tell was all just total BS. The ozone layer is 15 miles above all weather & CFCs are significantly heavier than air. They just needed some way to ban competitors from making cheap CFCs while they rolled out CFHCs.