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Thanks for your thoughts and info everyone so far, - did I say this wasn't going to be a long post? Any further insights would be very welcome!
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Maybe what might have happened, Rick - and it's only a guess - is that a neck blank from another Fender model was used with a wider spacing (what is the dot spacing on a USA Standard) - before they sand to shape the blanks all look the same and have dots inserted, and as the thinskins have the wider radius they are sort of a low-volume, probably with more selectivity about the body grain etc.
Involve humans and there's always a potential for error. It would make yours a bit rarer if this worked out to be the case. Fender deliberately changed the dot spacing on the reissues so as to remove the possibility or people passing them off as old ones.
I am sure yours is a USA Tele - never seen a CIJ/MIJ that colour, and the stock 52Ri and the CIJ ones too the colour coat is very visible for thickness if you pull the control plate off, especially the screwholes, so the fact yours is not lends credence to it being a Thinskin.
You can also pick the CIJ/MIJ neck profile as it is more like a rounded C and narrower at the nut than the US, which has a pronounced U-shape with deeper shoulders and 'feels' bigger. Also, the Japanese neck colour is usually darker than yours. Yours has the lighter tint common to newer AVRIs.