It is worse than 17 years, actually. It is 17 years from date of grant, not date of filing. The USPTO takes years to review a patent, so your effective monopoly period is 17 years + USPTO review time.
In Europe and other jurisdictions the protection period is 20 years from date of filing (rather than starting at the date of grant). There's patent reform legislation currently being considered that would make this improvement to US patent law (and, yes, you understand correctly that the typical software patent review takes more than 3 years, often much longer. That makes the terrible job they do all the more inexcusable, even though companies do game the process with things like claim amendments). In any case, you're absolutely right that the 2-year software patent doesn't solve the novelty and non-obviousness issues.
I'd add that a 2-year software patent would have to be 2 years from date of filing. Anything starting at date of grant would be far too long. Unfortunately, a 2-year from filing software patent would mean that you'd need to speed up USPTO review by an order of magnitude and make it higher-quality. If anyone can come up with a way of doing that that is better than a robot just stamping "No" on every application, I'd be pretty impressed.
In Europe and other jurisdictions the protection period is 20 years from date of filing (rather than starting at the date of grant). There's patent reform legislation currently being considered that would make this improvement to US patent law (and, yes, you understand correctly that the typical software patent review takes more than 3 years, often much longer. That makes the terrible job they do all the more inexcusable, even though companies do game the process with things like claim amendments). In any case, you're absolutely right that the 2-year software patent doesn't solve the novelty and non-obviousness issues.
I'd add that a 2-year software patent would have to be 2 years from date of filing. Anything starting at date of grant would be far too long. Unfortunately, a 2-year from filing software patent would mean that you'd need to speed up USPTO review by an order of magnitude and make it higher-quality. If anyone can come up with a way of doing that that is better than a robot just stamping "No" on every application, I'd be pretty impressed.