I remember this episode quite distinctly -- I remember being frustrated with it almost the entire way through. Even though TNG was a tiny bit anti-bureaucracy or would feature unreasonable characters in power, they never went full-on in portraying Starfleet as broadly incompetent, capricious, or unfair. So it was hard to entertain the premise that Data's personhood was in any danger, for even a moment of runtime, and as a result I mostly just wanted them to get on with the story without all of the legal posturing.
I do agree there were some great speeches, and it was a very interesting opportunity to show Data's character through things like his possessions, like you mentioned.
Just for fun (not really a judgment on the episode's quality one way or the other), there's a very entertaining video from Legal Eagle on YouTube about this episode, analyzing whether the actual court scenes were accurate (spoiler: not very).
My brain misfired here and I thought you were saying Lore's actor was unavailable...it took me a moment of confusion to actually parse your statement correctly!