You're clearly not the target audience for this program, which is fine, but that's not in itself a problem with what they did.
Cloudflare found a model that successfully distributed the cost of killing a patent troll between many passionate volunteers who were in it for the pleasure of taking down a troll. They succeeded, and in the process put other patent trolls on notice that our collective hatred for them is enough to raise an army of volunteers that's cheap to motivate and extremely effective. The low budget is part of the success story here!
A patent troll's whole game is for it to be more expensive to fight back than to cave, and you're complaining that Cloudflare managed to flip the economics.
I'm skeptical this made that big a difference in terms of total cost. The biggest cost (maybe overwhelming majority) is probably the attorneys, which I'm confident Cloudflare didn't skimp on. Anyone from Cloudflare with hard data is welcome to correct me if I'm wrong.
Cloudflare found a model that successfully distributed the cost of killing a patent troll between many passionate volunteers who were in it for the pleasure of taking down a troll. They succeeded, and in the process put other patent trolls on notice that our collective hatred for them is enough to raise an army of volunteers that's cheap to motivate and extremely effective. The low budget is part of the success story here!
A patent troll's whole game is for it to be more expensive to fight back than to cave, and you're complaining that Cloudflare managed to flip the economics.