The most common patterns all have names, just because it's so much easier to talk about a "loaf" than "you know, the sort of triangular one with the corners missing". This page shows the relative frequency of a kind of pattern called "still lifes" http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/List_of_common_still_lifes but most of the pages linked from there are auto-generated stubs. http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Loaf

Edit: You're right, people put a lot of time into discovering and engineering things in Life. But it's an odd mix of cleverness and brute-forcing. http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Glider_synthesis