To a certain extent I agree with you pic, but you must admit that from day one the plan was to leverage the old tailings to provide the funding to do all of the work needed on the mountain to satisfy what they knew were going to be daunting regulatory hurdles.

I think they vastly underestimated the extent of the work required to get the value out of the tailings.

I don't believe there was ever any "decision" to go right up on the mountain and start mining "new" ore. They just didn't have the ability to do that right off the bat - they needed the income from that tailings.

Obviously, that hasn't worked out very well. But I think if they would have installed a full flotation system right away (which they obviously couldn't afford), they would be in the mountian by now.

So you're right, no home run, but we can at least hope for a double or triple.