[twtw]

Your garden analogy is poor for several reasons.

the primary reason is that it is not remotely comparable to the theft of trade secrets in my example. If the gardener put their garden in a greenhouse and put a padlock on the door, then the scenario would be more comparable, but then it wouldn't make a lot of sense to say it should "obviously" be legal for someone to break in and take a sniff, because it's just a sniff, right?

Your parent/child analogy is poor because you are just describing an investment that doesn't pay off for any number of reasons, not that somebody stole the value from you. Perhaps more comparable would be if a parent raised a child until adulthood, at which point someone stole the young adult, brainwashed them to think they were the parents, and the child visited the fake parents in their old age.

That sounds far fetched, but it is far more comparable to the scenario I introduced of someone stealing a company's intellectual property and profiting off of it.