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What I don't know about this exchange can fill a multi-volume set of finely bound books. But I do know that the very nature of prisoner exchanges is that you will always feel scrod. If you fancy that your side is the good side, this will be doubly true, because if you fancy that your side is the good side, then you believe your side imprisons people for just reasons, and the other side imprisons people for unjust reasons.
You also believe that your side treats prisoners as humanely as possible and the other side rejects such a notion.
That's the starting point. You know you're eating a crap sandwich going in, and you order a review of whatever policies put your side behind the eight ball in the first place, but behind the eight ball is where you are. I am humbly and humanely grateful for the repatriation of any unjustly imprisoned American while hating the nature of geopolitics that puts our fellow citizens in this situation. Those are just two notions you have to be able to have at the same time, because outright victory simply may not be on the table. It almost never is.
I also have met enough State Department employees to know the touch-and-go circumstances of their work. Most days, there are no good options, but one option is better than another, one option is best, and the most wretched options are usually better than war, so you knot your tie, go to work, and spend half your day trying to get an appointment with the assistant attaché for grain futures in Belarus, which will probably waste everyone's time, but just might be the key to a diplomatic breakthrough that saves lives and averts disasters.
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