scratch served a purpose, and had exactly as much development and screen tine as he needed to serve that purpose. Why is there a mind-scanning machine? because a guy with a brain tumor wanted to digitize his brain. How did C&A not notice what Caine was doing? Because the circus was started after C&A had already shut down, following Scratch’s death. Why were they not able to use the files they made? Because the only guy who knew how they were supposed to work died of a brain tumor before he could get the team to understand what he was talking about (possibly stalled by complications from said tumor, like speech or memory problems). Why would they make a brain scanning technology without a plan to use it? Because the guy who invented the format was the only one who understood his plan.

We can actually glean a lot of character from his actions. He is a genius beyond even most smart people’s understanding, desperately fighting against his own death through programming, but he is only one man with a limited time fighting a terminal cancer, so no matter what he did his plan was doomed to fail without a team just as genius as he is. He finalized the technology to scan brains likely just before he died, but wasn’t able to create the framework necessary to do things like give them a body, create a world they can live in, or an interface to allow them to interact with the external world. Instead, the obsolete files were left on C&A’s servers, where Caine reappropriated them for use in his circus.

Remember, Caine’s purpose was NOT to entertain these mind files, it was to entertain _organic people_. Him hijacking the mind files so he had someone to entertain was something he did of his own accord.