Compared to the cost of drafting, litigation, etc., the actual filing fee for a patent is a ridiculously small sum of money. If the patent office has the obligation to review a patent with the same attention to detail as the authors themselves, why doesn't it cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to file a patent?
What costs is getting an attorney to write it in such a way as to see it awarded.
While in theory you can write your own (and file for the small fee), in practice your self-authored application won't be awarded a patent and your invention will become free public knowledge.
Nearly all parents are awarded to big companies with massive teams of lawyers. The "little guy" patent is mostly a myth.
imo so that normal people can afford to patent not just the big guys which is one of the reasons the patent exist in the first place
It is not the patent filing fee that matters. It is the litigation costs when some entity willfully impinges upon your patent. Big companies can afford litigation and often cross-license patents.