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Is this maybe a capped die strike? Is this what you mean when you say "very thin, split-before-strike planchet"?
A capped die strike will sometimes leave either a brockage(incuse mirror image from the die cap acting as a die) or a ghost outline of the die design showing through a thinning cap. The intermediate stages usually show very little detail on the affected face. I suspect that Mike Diamond's hypothesis is correct and I would base that on the relative strength of the fuzzy reverse details.
A split planchet is basically a lamination on steroids, i.e. an entire face of a planchet splits off in a thin layer. In this case, the thin split planchet would have been in the coining chamber along with a normal planchet and the reverse of your coin was struck through the split planchet. In this scenario, there would also be a thin split planchet out in the wild somewhere with the fully struck reverse design.