It may seem that every extra omission makes a simile correspondingly stronger. That rule fails because different omissions do different work. Suppressing the subject mainly relies on contextual recovery, while omitting the respect or particle changes how likeness itself is presented.
“Zayd is a lion” names two elements, and an elliptical “A lion!” may name just one, yet both can omit the respect and particle in the same way. Their rhetorical intensity cannot be ranked by element count alone.
Number of omissions and semantic force of particular omissions are separate measures. Condensation through context is not automatically a new degree of overstatement.