Not stupid at all. I can assure you far dumber questions have and will grace the pages of Hot Copper.
The conglomerate doesn't daylight on the eastern side, as stated in the Loudens section of the update from March. I'm not sure which presentation you're referring to, but I think I know the diagram you're talking about and that's actually looking south. The historic prospector workings and most of the nuggets are on the west side, which is shown on the right of that diagram.
I think they're focusing on the west side first because it has had the historic workings, and is were they've found most of the nuggets. Which answers your question about digging through the screen layer; someone did. They just didn't go very far and only in one spot, where most of the gold has been shedding.
We don't yet know what the layer at Loudens is like. Is it one? Is it multiple? Won't know until they've scraped out a trench and looked at it.
The team seemed happy to jump drilling it to go straight to bulk sampling it. I assume they will come back and do more drilling if things go well, to figure out how far the conglomerates stretch. There isn't much point drilling out to determine how far the conglomerates stretch if you don't know for sure that there is gold in them, and in which particular parts have gold.
Once you confirm that, you can expand the search with drilling.
Hope that helps.
Cheers
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