Ya know... way back when I was still in service, one of my Section asked me to identify a strange M16 they had seen in the hands of a another Infantry unit. As it was, the Digger with the strange M16 happened to walk past a little while later so my mate pointed it out to me.
It looked like a mix between an M16A1 and an M16A2... because that's pretty much what it was. It was an M16A1 fitted with the buttstock and forestock of the M16A2.
The Australian military got it's M16s way back in the 1970s, naturally enough they were A1 models. However by the 1990s, some spare parts for the A1s were as rare as rocking horse shit in Australia and so the Army sourced certain M16A2 parts that would fit, i.e. the furniture.
So my point for this rambling reminiscence is perhaps the AKMR could be viewed as actually an AK74 that has been repaired at the depot level with certain parts from the AKM, e.g. stocks, pistol grips and so on, not the internal parts or sights etc. etc. but it's enough to make the rifle look "odd" compared to an AKM or an AK74. Odd enough for Western troops to give it a name to designate it as something other than an AKM or AK74 because they didn't know when they first encountered it, that it was just a repaired AK74.
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