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Notes -
Shalit was an extreme case, but unprecedented in degree rather than kind: the history of past prisoner exchanges and hostage negotiations was filled with lopsided counts, and there are a few like the 1983 Fatah exchange (794:1) that got pretty close. Ostensibly, these exchanges were meant to show how much the IDF valued its own people over hurting Arabic peoples, though in practice the disparity in number of captured prisoners to exchange almost certainly played a role.
He'd also become a minor cause celebre among Israelis, and not along the typical breakdown you'd expect. Anti-Hamas Israelis made up a significant part of the group wanting him freed at nearly any cost, up to and including several protests intended to disrupt shipments in and out of Palestinian areas. I don't know if that's just a ramification of Israel's draft, or some broader philosophical or cultural difference.
More controversially, I think the post-2008-era Likud philosophy for Palestine was one of disengagement, and large prisoner exchanges might have been a part of that. Not that they believed that these groups were harmless, but that they'd been mitigated to such extent that a lot of the past threats were no longer available; if these released prisoners were any more radicalized, they'd be limited to bomb threats at the checkpoints, firing rockets that didn't work well, and the occasional kidnapping (which was now, if more in theory than in practice, motivated to keep their ransoms live). At the same time, Palestinian prisoners were politically expensive (especially under international scrutiny) to hold, and require complicated hoops to hold within bounds of international law, and the Israeli government could not release without a good excuse otherwise, both to save face and because many had blood on their hands. If that was truly a motivation for the prisoner exchange, that was a wrong belief, but it wasn't as unreasonable in 2018 as today.
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