Your premise on why shareholders are not underwater rests on the...

Your premise on why shareholders are not underwater rests on the belief that they all averaged down at opportune times. Mine is that some or many holders didn't.

The maths of averaging is not complicated, but it relies on people buying more shares low after having bought high. That is your thinking in regards to AZY, perhaps based on your personal experience, but it's not possible for either of us to know. I don't agree it's a given that long-term holders would have but, again, that's my opinion, based on knowing many people in many stocks who haven't taken the opportunity of a deflated price, usually because they're scared they might be throwing good money after bad, or they don't have the cash. In some cases, they're glad they didn't because the company never recovered. In other cases they've kicked themselves later when it did.

Maybe AZY will deliver one day. Maybe it won't. There may be no universal definition of "speculative", but I don't agree with your assessment that all stocks are. Yes, there is a degree of speculation for every company because we don't know the many variables that will determine its share price, or what the future holds. But clearly there are some that don't pose a great risk, and those that are very risky – the latter are what I term "speculative". I gauge the level of speculation/risk along the lines of the categories that are often mocked because they sound so convoluted, but actually make some sense:

Known knowns = Low level speculation. Think CBA, CSL. "Blue chip", solid companies, high barriers to entry. Prone to normal fluctuations but unlikely to fail.
Known unknowns = More risk due to issues such as being prone to disruption, low barriers to entry in the field. Still big, solid companies. Think Telstra.
Unknown unknowns = High level speculative. Not a big company, not delivering impressive results, share price based on hope, which may or may not be justified. Think AZY (although the same could have been said for Amazon and Afterpay too, as both took years to turn a profit and were early movers in unknown fields.)

I noticed a comment you made on another thread: "We are waiting on sentiment/money flow to return to the sector." Well, yes, that would help the share price move. Call me old-fashioned, but I think we're waiting on results that would justify the sentiment/money flow returning.