Rail against patents. They may have been made with good intentions but they have failed miserably at their purpose.

Has there ever been an instance where an inventor with limited resources used a software patent to protect significant innovation?

Has anyone, anywhere, ever once faced a coding challenge, searched through software patents, and found a useful solution?

I'm laughing as I try to imagine either of these things happening.

A friend of mine recently earned good money serving as an expert witness against a patent claiming to cover the concept of transmitting a zero over a carrier wave. You see, the patent holder never actually produced a device taking advantage of this great idea, and then he "hurt his back and couldn't work anymore", so he sued his insurance company for the billions of potential dollars he could have earned if he ever did get around to transmitting a zero...

Quite a bizarre story, what on earth is "transmitting a zero"?

That may be (part) of the purpose, but the implementation details facilitate abuse. Also, software patents are somewhat controversial, with other countries banning them, so railing against them as something that shouldn't exist at all is a reasonable view to take.

Don't we need to find something that does help the small innovator? Maybe what patents "should" be

That's not the point of patents. The point of patents is to give your invention to the world/country and in return, the government will protect your invention for a period of time, after which, the novel idea will be donated to the public domain by the government. The idea being that for both the inventor and the people, it's a win-win.

It doesn't always work out that way, but it's definitely not how you are putting it.