From the other side, I cannot imagine using the data without intimate knowledge of the entire setup. There are very few people that can look meaningfully at such kind of data, which is why publishing the dataset (and all the work it involves) is often neglected.
Not to defend the behavior in any way, but remind yourself: in the current research model, if you can't make a publication with it, it's not worth your time. For a dataset, I've seen people factor-in the effort to make it public VS the potential citations you could get out of it.
disclaimer: I work in research
Of course modern journals are a disgrace to the enlightenment. But the solution is to fix them, or if that can't be done, replace them. Not to stop the system of peer review entirely.
Which is why it's high time publishing data along with research is made the default, if not mandatory. This way the incentives are aligned and there's time and money budget for this vital task. Some journals are leading the way here.
When scientists play a part in the open access problem it's like having doctors who smoke cigarettes. There are plenty reasons the cancer is happening already without the leaders of a field contributing to it.
"In our field of particle physics, there isn't the tradition of making data public," says Thaler. "To actually get data publicly with no other restrictions—that's unprecedented."