The mint engraver made the design with low relief wordmarks, it's just part of the design. Even the high relief 1921 had the same weak strike on the legends/motto.
Yes, most of them are. But as noted, it's largely because of the design. The other factor that comes into play is that the pressure was kept as low as possible to keep the dies from failing. But look at the coin, that's an awful lot of lettering all crammed together in one small area of the coin. The easy way to explain why the lettering is usually weak is because it would take a lot of metal to properly fill all of that lettering, or higher striking pressure. And there just wasn't enough metal, or pressure, to do that.
Or more simply stated than above uneven loading on the dies causes one area to be more weakly struck.
I think the '21 was generally better, for obvious reasons. With a little effort you can find other years with better metal flow. But I wouldn't disagree with the info above. Lance.
With any coin, you may have to look through 20-30 or more at the same grade before finding a really good example, and more than likely, you will not have to pay much more for it.
