Based on my experience working as a consultant to patent litigators, it's worse than that. I dove pretty deep over a few beers with these guys on this subject. What they told me is that in the US patent system, you can pretty much forget about using obviousness as a defense. Yes it exists as a concept but if you intend to use it, you'll probably lose so they never try to use it.
And. Some solutions that seem very obvious in retrospect can be the result of years of shaking down kinks, letting expert intuition crystalize, until something almost 'dumb' fixes into an invention.
