I feel that management has been asked to hurry things along...

I feel that management has been asked to hurry things along which is why they are performing the consolidation PRE DFS because they are THAT confident that funding by an Insta/strategic partner won't be an issue.

So in the spirit of getting things moving along, they performed the consolidation in parallel with the optimised study/DFS. No time wasting.

consolidate > seek
funding partner by sharing Razorback data > optimised study > DFS

I reckon a funding partner will be locked in post optimised study before the DFS is out. That is my gut feel.

it shows that mgmt is confident that they will get the money.