In addition, Stardust carried an equally important payload on the opposite side of the cometary collector: the first samples of contemporary interstellar dust ever collected.
Whereas the cometary samples are relatively easy to extract from the collector plates, that is not the case for the interstellar dust samples.
Extraction at Berkeley of a keystone from a tile on the Stardust cometary dust collector.
So the cometary dust work had to take priority.