Well, there's the problem: the v7-A and v7-R manual.
That manual uses unified assembly syntax, meaning that old ARM and Thumb are described together. Because of irregularities in Thumb, the old ARM instructions end up being described in a way that is needlessly verbose. You lose the insight into how the opcodes are actually decoded.
Look at an older manual. ARMv5 will do nicely. There, you can see that the MOV instruction is mostly described by 2 bits. (one condition code is stolen) In an even older ARM, such as ARMv4 I think, it really is just 2 bits.
That manual uses unified assembly syntax, meaning that old ARM and Thumb are described together. Because of irregularities in Thumb, the old ARM instructions end up being described in a way that is needlessly verbose. You lose the insight into how the opcodes are actually decoded.
Look at an older manual. ARMv5 will do nicely. There, you can see that the MOV instruction is mostly described by 2 bits. (one condition code is stolen) In an even older ARM, such as ARMv4 I think, it really is just 2 bits.