Ok, so say someone says "We're overloaded, we need more people" so someone else says "Ok, department Q, R and T changes priority to doing redaction" then at least one person somewhere in this chain has to at least consider that every person from Q, R and T must go through at least a 3 slide powerpoint or whatever saying what's happening, this is what to do, this is what to not do, right?

They should all have been using the same redaction tooling.

If I were to hazard a guess, pure speculation, I would say the unretrievable parts were court / previously redacted and the retrievable parts are the latest round of panicked rushed redactions.