This is just a random thought.
Given the content of the unclassified intelligence report, it seems pretty clear that Putin was aiming to destabilize the election and harm Hillary Clinton. It’s less clear that he was trying to boost Trump. Under this scenario, virtually all of what is known about their meddling can be accounted for by postulating that the Russians believed, as virtually everyone in the world did, that Clinton was the sure winner. Their aim was to weaken her—that is, to weaken her who would become the American president. They never considered the possibility that the Land of the Free would elect a buffoon, but their occasional faint praise for him was part and parcel of their general plan to weaken the US public’s faith in the process (by increasing support for an out-and-out buffoon).
In other words, when the news came that Trump had won, this theory holds that Putin was as shocked as anyone, and undoubtedly felt like a blend of the dog who caught the school bus and the cat that swallowed the canary. In fact, a little like Trump himself probably felt.
This changes the view of things a bit. First, it contradicts the claim that Russia’s goal (or one of them) was to get Trump elected. In fact, if you think about it, given what everyone “knew” during the campaign, that would have been a foolhardy goal. Meddling in order to weaken Americans’ faith in our democratic process and in the next American president is pretty bad, but marginally less bad than doing all that plus working deliberately to get a specific candidate elected.
Second, it leads to a prediction: if Putin’s aim is to weaken American’s faith in the democratic process and to weaken the American president, his job is not done. His (Putin’s) propaganda/disinformation machine will soon be hard at work undermining President Trump, as well as continuing to denigrate our system in any way it can. In this case, I think we need to be careful not to get caught up in it: it would be just as wrong for Democrats to become tools of Russian cyber-meddling as it is now for a number of Republicans.
Finally, it should diminish our estimate of Russian cyber-power a bit. Yes, they were active during the election campaign, yes, they hacked, yes, they spread propaganda and disinformation. None of that is really doubted. But if they weren’t trying to get Trump elected, then that outcome really had little directly to do with their intentions. This isn’t to deny that by undermining Clinton, they probably caused some voters to stay home, vote for a third party, or maybe even for Trump, thereby playing a role in the result. But this doesn’t have to have been deliberate. If it was deliberate, then we should be in awe of their cyber-prowess and their superior intelligence capabilities, but I don’t think it was.