The powerpoint decks that were published were pretty self explanatory and graphical. Journalists would not have been able to make any sense of a bunch of log files anyway.
And despite that we've seen multiple levels of deflection and outright lies even with the level of details provided.
Norwegian newspapers backtracked and apologised for writing articles exposing Norwegian participation in illegal metadata monitoring, arguing that the monitoring that for all of the other parties involved was about domestic monitoring in Norway's case for some reason was about Afghanistan.
Had it not been for the amount of surrounding context, the lies would have been believable. Even then it took the then head of military security to step up and make claims about operational issues in military security that they never talk about, to draw attention away from the vague denials of the police security service.
But the sheer amount of data, coupled with the revelation that the US itself captured full recordings of the same conversations that Norwegian surveillance supposedly captured valuable metadata about made it stand out as a ludicrous cover-up.
And still the newspapers did not dare challenge it even with all the extra details.
As it stands, Snowden released too little - even with all the material he did provide, it was still something that proved possible to sufficiently deflect from that it had shockingly little impact.
I think we have a test case for your hypothesis. The snowden disclosures started with a single court order and then the prism slide deck. Go look at the initial redirections and denials about the first prism slides for a pretty good taste of where things would have stopped if that was all he put out: https://www.google.com/search?q=prism+slides+denial
