Hi widget!
Well, more input never hurts, especially if anyone in the same position reads this thread in future.
If I'm understanding correctly, the suit I ordered doesn't have a double fabric cover. It has fabric on the outside, and then a plain "skin" on the inside. This is supposed to be a feature because the "skin" bonds better with one's own skin, and so less water gets in (which makes it warmer). Also, there is nothing to need to dry on the inside of the suit between dives. (Of course, as you say, double fabric is probably fine too.)
I didn't specifically seek out this material, but it sounds good. I'll report back about how I like it after I have it and have taken some dives with it.
Trivial side notes: When I used to make sprayskirts, wetsuits, and booties with sheet neoprene, for kayking, it was "nylon 1" material. (This was all pre-Internet, so who knew the origins of what we were getting or how to compare it to what others were doing.) We used it skin side in for easy don/doffage and simply glued in the seams and zippers. Other people had "nylon 2" material, and that seemed very cool and fancy, but also less stretchy (they also had... gasp...
colors). I suppose this has probably changed with Lycra and etc. which would be more stretchy.
I understand that the skin side is more damage prone, but I never had any problems with that, and we certainly weren't overly careful with our kayaking gear. However, we were never more than a few feet underwater, so compression wasn't even a thought.
At some point windsurfing became popular and then all of a sudden you could buy wetsuits ready-made, with colors and thread stitching and everything! (We didn't look to dive wetsuits at the time because they were all rather thick neoprene.) It got to the point where I felt old when someone looked at mine and said... "You can
make a wetsuit?"
B.