Tin was trading around $20k/t for the last five years...nowhere...

Tin was trading around $20k/t for the last five years...nowhere near enough to sink $200M into an open pit mine (which was what Mt. Lindsay was designed and costed to be). First of all, nobody would have debt funded the venture at those prices, and given the share price at that time, CR was not an option at all.

You could argue that they should have sunk more drills into the resource to prepare for the rosy future (our present), but with tin at $20k/t, and no ability to see into the future, that didn't seem like the best course of action at the time. Instead, they secured some promising tenements in WA, which are still potentially more profitable than Mt. Lindsay. And now, given tin is tipped as going into a super-cycle, the support (from Govt, investors, lenders) for developing Mt. Lindsay will be a lot stronger than it was then.

Management of VMS has been far from perfect. But trying to get the tin out of the ground in 2015-2020 would have been galactically stupid. As a LT holder, I'm very pleased they didn't follow your thinking, and instead waited for the commodity cycle to come around again.