RE: strannick Southpen;
Thank you for bringing some much needed coherence to this discussion. Couldnt agree with you more, options strike price should always be above the shareprice. I agree an all share Hecla deal would have been more interesting, as the goal here is for shareholders to avail of all the upside potential of US Silver.
That said, the upside is of course better with the more favorable share/reserves-leveraged cashflow of US Silver v. the combined entity.
Like you said, management should obviously be rewarding themselves after performance, not before, but likewise, putting in an entire new management and paying out their contracts and starting over is just shooting ourselves in the foot.
Regarding the Drum merge. Its primary advantage was staving off the merger with Hecla. US Silver was insanely undervalued and ripe for the picking off. Of course there would have been alot more favorable candidates to merge with than Drum. However, the realpolitic, sad-truth reality of the matter is that with Drum, you now have a combined bloc of institutionals from RX and USA -Sprott- who are united in not selling out and committing to developing the resource. My experience has been you have to look at such realistic, non ideological, least-worst outcomes, and go from there on the road to production and development.