Thank you for the thoughtful and thorough reply MrPink. To answer your questions: Most or all of the clashing appears to be doubled. As for a letter transfer, I did note an outline along the neckline that may be a clashed n. For device doubling, I believe that there may be some on the obverse from the tip of the nose up to the hairline, particularly on the forehead (I'm curious if this may actually be counterclashing). There's very little die cracking at all; given the apparent scarcity of this potential new
VAM, my theory is that the coin was struck from relatively new dies and that when the clashing occurred they just moved on to a new die pair. According to VAMWorld there were 35 obverse and 26 reverse dies used for the 1896-S so there should have been plenty available. I don't have much experience with RPMs but I don't notice any obvious repunching, certainly not like the S/S on VAMs 5, 6 and 8. Please let me know if you have any follow-up questions, thank you again.