To be honest I'd rather they use the cash in order to advance...

To be honest I'd rather they use the cash in order to advance their expertise. Not only explore and add value that way but take over some of these juniors with quality ready to mine resources that a trading for peanuts. Some of these sub $100M MC juniors literally have millions of shovel ready ounces, are trading at 52 week lows, whilst gold is at all time highs. Instead of sitting on $800M that loses value every minute, keep enough as sustaining capital, use your cashflow to fund existing operations, and start financing some of these projects.

If I were decision maker I would do some financing deals, perhaps with MAU (for example), for equity. Also purchase some dirt cheap existing resources to help feed existing mills. Nows the time to be accretive rather than conservative. Don't want to end up chasing aquisition growth when ounces are valued 200% or more higher.

A buyback is literally just a dividend. It pays 1R. We invest here for their expertise, to use what they know about mining to 5R our cash. If we wanted a fixed rate of income we'd have it in the bank, without equity risk.