How would staging the dies stop it from cracking? I'm still stretching it to the same size so that doesn't make sense to me.
on a smaller scale have a look at deep drawing transfer presses, they shape metal in stages rather that trying to shape metal in one go. with production runs in 10's of thousands, they would make them with one operation rather than several, as the production rate is slower and tooling costs much more for the transfer presses.