You can't just pretend a solution is possible because you want it to be. You can't just pluck random figures out of the air like $5M and 6 months and expect them to be relevant, especially when they're a fraction of what has already been poured in with no results at all.
In reality, AGY is almost certainly a dead man walking. Sometimes people assume there must be a possible path to victory, but in reality, most startups fail rather than make it, and often that's because of a fundamental problem which could never be overcome - often it's as simple as a company having a speculative tenement, they get some promising preliminary data, the market gets excited, they raise capital, they develop the mine, the price goes up, they discover they actually don't have a viable resource in the ground, and in that sort of scenario, failure was always 100% inevitable, so it does come (usually after a lot of smoke and mirrors in announcements and management milking the situation for as many years as possible to make themselves piles of money, while shareholders are strung along, often with multiple CRs etc to keep management enjoying their remuneration).
You can say "They've produced BG lithium so the method works" until you're blue in the face, but the reality is that they've never been able to do it at commercial scale, they've tried for many years and made no progress. It's very likely that whether they just don't have the ability to do it, or whether the chemistry of their brine is just too difficult to work with, or whatever the issue is, they're just not ever going to get there.
At some point, after a certain number of years, after investing a certain number of millions of dollars, if you've made no progress, you have to accept you're probably not going to. If you think zero progress after this many years and management saying it's not even worth trying to make any progress at this time is a scenario in which you still want to be optimistic, hey, that's on you.
AGY is between rock and a hard place. They can either burn themselves out trying and failing (doing so would just cause more dilution, a further demonstration they can't do it, and a much lower share price) or sit in hibernation (delaying the inevitable, but getting there more slowly, allowing management more time with their snouts in the trough).
You can sit there arguing about which option is better for shareholders, but in both scenarios it's clearly worse than selling. The only reason you would be holding this trash is that you're too emotionally invested and can't face getting out at a loss. Sometimes there just aren't any good options left, in which case your best option is to cut your losses and go.
And, more relevant than arguing about what a company *should* do, is to look at what a company actually *is* doing.
They already made the choice to shut down all operations. That's the reality. They're not going to get rid of Pablo and family. That's the reality. To restart operations now means rehiring staff, getting everything going again, it's a really really big process, not just a switch you flick back on. It's highly possible that AGY is never going to resume any form of operations again, but if it does, it's not going to be soon and it's going to happen after significant dilution in order to obtain the necessary funds.
Yep, I agree, from a shareholder's perspective, or from the perspective of giving the company the best chance of ever producing lithium carbonate, it would have made more sense to just go all out and do whatever is necessary to make the plant work. Go hard, make it work, or die trying. But, that was not in the best interests of management, so it's not what happened. As a shareholder you don't call the shots, you just observe the situation and have a duty to yourself to decide whether or not it's in your best interests to hold according to what is actually happening, not what you think should happen or what would happen if you or someone else was running the company in a different way.
The fact that management didn't continue trying to make the plant work really does show that they knew it just wasn't going to happen, and it's better for them to leave some doubt with the shareholders than to give them confirmation.
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