I think you'll find that what may appear to you or I as 'just...

I think you'll find that what may appear to you or I as 'just opinion' in the @2ic post, are actually shrewd deductive conclusions based on the outcomes that have appeared, ie facts (a reverse engineering of sorts).

The problem as to why it may look non-factual is that we may not have enough technical understanding and therefore we can't see the hidden story in the dots. That means we also don't get to appreciate the deductive logic in what is described in his assessment.

Just because something looks like it is not based on facts doesn't mean it isn't. Black smoke out of the exhaust tells a mechanic that oil is burning in the engine (but to a dog it is just black smoke and the notion that oil is burning may look non-factual).

So it turns out that what you @IndexFund wrote may just be opinion. That in and of itself doesn't define it as correct or incorrect, but if what I wrote (my opinion) is correct, then your opinion is wrong and 2ic's opinion is factual.

What's life for if we can't have a bit of fun .

Having said all that, let's not dwell too much on what could have been (and 2ics post is in large part a narration of the white pointer shark that we were unawares of and swam just metres under us when we were swimming).

The facts now point at Bruce and team having come up with an iteration, which yes in China dependant, but economically very robust assuming the china reliance doesn't get obstructed through politics, just like our Iron Ore industry.

I too am curious as to what else has been stripped out of capex to give us the $381mil figure, but really at the end of the day, that too is not so relevant as the NPV number takes all that into account (through higher opex) and still we end up with a very robust NPV (SFX share $640mil rising to ~$1.2 bil in 2028).