Why The Hamlet is a lesser-known Faulkner novel

It's one of the forgotten William Faulkner novels, never mentioned among the set of his groundbreak, daunting, most famous novels, Sound & Fury, Light in August, Absolum (which I found almost impossible to make sense of when I returned to it a few years back) nor among the lighter and more entertaining such as As I Lay Dying nor, thankfully, almost the almost parodic works of late years or the highly self-conscious novellas such as The Bear - but The Hamlet, which I started re-reading last night, is a central piece in the Y. County puzzle, accounting for the arrival of the Snopes clan in Frenchman's Bend. The Snopeses are in a sense the first breakdown in the social order - the backwoods, conniving, declasse family that arrives, insinuates into the culture, eventually builds to a degree of wealth and power, but not style, through hustle and instinct - in other words, a deep South version of the death of the aristocracy and the rise of the bourgeoisie. First few chapters involve the Snopes clan of six showing up suddenly and cutting a deal to rent a vacant farmhouse from the most powerful family in the town, the Varners, a deal Jody Varner quickly regrets when he learns that Snopes has a history of landlord disputes resolved by barn-burning and quickly leaving town. But Varner comes up with some obscure scheme to get the Snopeses to plan the farm and then scare them off before harvest - then hiring a team of cheap labor to harvest the fields and take all the profits. Obviously, this will backfire - just a question of how. Jody, son of a true patriarch, the one who does all the work to maintain the family holdings and run the family store, will clearly clash with his coeval in the Snopes family, oldest son, Flem. The Hamlet is probably a little lesser known than it should be because there are no obvious stylistic quirks such as the stream of conscioussness, extended first-person narration, or syntactic exuberance of the more famous works; also, it's quite long, so not a good entry point for first-time Faulkner readers, nor for students in a fiction class. It's broken into four sections, though, and it could be that each could stand as a novella, though I've never heard of someone reading one of the sections independently, as people do sometimes read (or are assigned to read) The Bear or, isn't there another one?, The River?