Open-records requests can be a huge amount of work, even if the records aren't secret - it's common for requesters to have an axe to grind, so you might want to

Open-records requests can be a huge amount of work, even if the records aren't secret - it's common for requesters to have an axe to grind, so you might want to know what that is (and whether you should be honoring the request, and whether that's actually optional, all of which isn't necessarily trivial); and it typically means you need to review all those documents - and understand them. Even if the examination is just cursory, although I have no firsthand experience, I can well imagine that for technical documents that were secret in a secretive organization this is going to be a time consuming process nobody really wants to do. As such, I don't think it's weird or even really all that sad when a request hits some speedbumps. It's kind of inevitable; it's work, it's specialized, it's not all too rewarding for the institution, it's thankless for the specific employee... It's a testament to the solidity of bureaucratic institutions that it gets done at all. Frankly, this all sounds like the process worked about as perfectly as you can expect - they actually got the data, all of it, and they could distribute it literally, too. It would be nice if it were easier to achieve transparency; but the flipside is that overzealous transparency laws can be abused too; at least here in the Netherlands there have been several cases where... creative... citizens decided to cash in on the fines imposed for non-compliance with such requests by spamming (iirc) municipalities with requests which had been phrased to be hard to deal with quickly, and hundreds of which submitted simultaneously. I believe the law has changed, but even so - requests like this aren't free. Somebody else is paying; and that's fine - but to expect them to furthermore go above and beyond and push for excellent service and quick turnaround is perhaps a little unreasonable.