"My understanding is that right from the start of these...

"My understanding is that right from the start of these additional expenses, being the exploration drive from Tommie to Roswell and SA, that ALK mgmt has been adding resources? Or have I got that wrong? Roswell reserves went 332K in Sept 2023 to 450K in Feb 24 - that's what? a 35% increase."

Not enough resources considering the size of the budget blowout.
Hapy to be corrected if I am wrong but the UG drive was always the plan if ALK were to get the approvals for the UG operations. It was to address, pollution, noise and traffic hazards of having the trucks using the highway. So this UG drive was not additional cost. In my correspondences with ALK I am not aware anyone pointing out the UG drive as the additional cost but only blaming inflation - my recollection.
ALK opted to push with the UG drive before anything else as there were delays with the Open Pits and the highway relocation. There were concerns with the wall designs around erosion - from what I read at the time.
On this front ALK acted right and pushed with the UG development first - credit where credit is due.

When the budget blows by around $80m which is about double of what was the original budget one needs to add lot more resources to make the metrics look attractive again.

And I am sure instos looked at this.
Only McLeans is additional resources.

TGEP resource shrank - I said this many times but people kept pointing out at the reserves. Reserves went up as ALK converted some of the indicated resources to reserves by tighter drilling grid. That is good as reserves have higher confidence than indicated resource. But Roswell resource shrank as some blocks could not be mined that ALK previously thought they may be able to.

In short Roswell reserves came from an existing resource and increased the confidence in the deposit but did not add more resources. Think of it as infill drilling. McLeans was additional resource.

AT the end it comes down to ALK blowing up the budget by significant margin which only leaves enough to keep paying wages to all of those who blew the budget but not enough to pay divis for many years to come - unless ALK adds more resources via exploration.

ALK will have to make another ~ $80m extra profit to get the money back from this investment and break-even - meaning another year before ROI starts to make sense. But by then LOM shrinks to only few years. Hence the importance of adding more ounces to the resource. No biases here just simple math and strategy.

Instos look for growth and divis. Pension funds mainly look for divis. ALK offers neither right now and delivered budget blowout (they are yet to report on and with zero updates on how the project is tracking) and terrible Q result.

ALK should have seen this playing out and the impact on the SP once investors realised.

Look at the share price - only today the market gave some credit to ALK as the new deal is the best they could do under the circumstances. So the market is paying attention and have been paying attention for long time.

To those that keep going with the "this is profitable operation.." my question is - For Whom? Without divis and ability to grow the company and the SP it is only profitable for the BoDs and the MD by giving themselves wages they don't deserve.

And look at the charts I posted few days ago - those two pictures/charts tell 1M words. Even SBM and PNR outperform ALK and that is all one need to see to realise there is more than just market sentiment.

all my own views...