Ha, I had the exact same experience. The lawyers sent me what they wrote for me to verify that they didn't mess anything up, and it almost seemed like they had based the patent on an entirely different document than the one I wrote up for the invention disclosure—not because they actually messed it up, but because patentese is almost as far from regular English as any foreign language.

Same- I had a very trivial idea and talked to a few lawyers who turned it into something that was far, far more complicated (and clever, in fact I wondered why they didn't just write patents on their own all day long). At the time, each submitted patent gained you $1K and if it was accepted ( I don't recall the actual terms) was $5K. Easy money! Hopefully, my ex-employer won't abuse this patent....

Yeah, factor of 10 expansion was my experience as well.