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I mean, he voluntarily undertook the search for documents, and they found a couple at an old office of his as well. To me, that seems fairly organic. It's of course possible that the whole thing is a smokeshow for some other, far more serious classified doc location or exposure, but I judge that unlikely. There was Hur assigned to look into things so it wasn't like the whole thing disappeared. And Hur did in fact look at the exact same Trump route, too! Biden's memoir writer, who didn't have clearance. Sounds like he did share some stuff, but evidence is so-so, and the writer deleted some recordings. However, apparently he had plausible, innocent sounding reasons (we can leave to the reader to judge if this is true though), cooperated a fair amount (supposedly this led to them recovering a good chunk of some deleted stuff). So anyways all this to say I trust Hur to have had decent access to what he needed and to have come to a relatively accurate conclusion that Biden was sloppy and careless but not big-criminal level. Trump on the other hand often had his lawyers stonewall, some of his people moved boxes, deleted footage, etc. even after things started, and maybe even got job perks for accepting lawyer help from Trump (and thus presumably buying them out).
In theory the system is supposed to identify degree of harm to the US if the info is exposed, but as you mention some of the reasoning is awfully consequentialist, rating "we did something bad that would make people hate us" as a degree of harm by itself, which is somewhat circular reasoning. To me the more compelling argument is more about how when things leak often enough, sometimes from a counterintel perspective you almost have to assume that merely unsecured information == leaked information. And that's a major, legitimate pain. Aside from confidential sources occasionally being outed. At least people like Snowden kinda-sorta tried to curate what they released with these considerations, whereas simple classified info exposure does not even have those protections.
The problem here is that I don't actually have any faith that the people doing the searching and investigation are doing so with a desire to actually find the truth. While I can't actually prove that Biden's case was soft-walked, there's a comparable case that happened just recently - the Hunter Biden laptop. Given your level of knowledge I'm going to assume you're familiar with the details of the case, but they paint a picture of an FBI that's thoroughly unwilling to go after Biden despite impeccably documented evidence of serious crimes. While they did eventually prosecute Hunter after it became a major issue and was leaked to the press, this only happened as a result of serious public pressure and attention. The FBI actually had his laptop for quite some time before the contents were leaked to Giuliani, and they didn't do anything about it. We know from the contents of the laptop that there were several unarguable and undeniable crimes (the doing crack part at the least) as well as traces of what seemed like an obvious influence-selling case... but the government did absolutely nothing with it, only intervening when the contents of the laptop started showing up in the media. Furthermore, there were multiple figures in the intelligence community who came out to knowingly lie about the origination of the laptop in order to help Biden's election chances. At the same time, we know that the government has actually been reprimanded in court for fucking with and manipulating evidence in the Trump documents case. The two sides are very clearly not being treated equally.
I freely admit that there's no direct evidence of serious wrongdoing here, but the last time the FBI came out and said that a Biden hadn't really done anything worth being charged for they were lying through their teeth and were only forced to recant once the evidence became public. That they were forced to actually admit something happened at all is enough to make me extremely suspicious - but I don't know what they could really do to assuage my doubts. Politicisation is a hell of a drug, and it means that I don't really have any trust or faith that they're telling the truth THIS time, when a lie would be perfectly in character and advance their political goals (for the record I believe these goals are anti-Trump rather than anti-Republican).
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