There are lots of reasons and you touch on some.
Mainly I think it was because they let their debt fester for far too long at Winfield's benefit and there was no incentive and probably no ability for Faber to change the situation. Some of the loans were in default for something like 2 or 3 years at the end. (I believe this was his plan) So Winfield was able to completely crush the early shareholders and go from the equivalent of a small creditor to a controlling shareholder when his debt was finally rolled into equity in 2010 (iirc). That was when he made some of those weird comments about wanting price to be lower.
This leads to mistake #2 when they raised 35 million this was more than enough to see them to profitable production and was intended to be the final low level raise. Instead it was just the first of so many it became a running joke amongst people I know. Management was not a good steward of that money period. I hesitate to even count them but it is probably like 6 or 7 raises in that time and that is completely crazy. They let their WPC permit lapse and decided they were going big time and they changed their applications and restarted a lot of the permitting process they had already completed. I think the state passed some other laws that slowed things down too, but 99% was managements decisions about how to deploy that precious capital. Then everything cost way more than expected, took way longer than expected, and the CRA probably did have a real effect draining away and wasting precious development dollars. So lode got into a cycle of raising money at ever lower prices just to keep the wheels turning even though they are not spitting out any money.
There probably is too much staff and something wrong with their mine plan if it is taking this long to earn even a single dollar. Yes there is overburden and some low grade stuff but two or three years of it? Madness. You make a mine plan in the first place to avoid this! Why does such a small mine need ~120 employees? I have no idea. It seems unnecessary for what they produce but this is linked to the first two points. All the PEA and prep work is done for the sole reason of determining how to mine a given deposit at a profit. IMO they have failed. Management is supposed to be a steward of that precious money and deploy it in a way to generate shareholder value. Value is created by advancing the mine to production and profits. Production without profits is pointless and so is spending fifty million on development work and then ignoring the data. So either a lot of the technical work early on is botched, which I find hard to believe given the professionals and amount of money involved, or the tech work is good and was just badly managed. I think it is the later, but even if it were the former it would still be the CEO's fault since he decided which technical people to employ. Maybe we are mining too big of an area, or too small, I don't know - but lode should know - since they spent fifty million figuring out the answer. If they don't have the answer the blame lies completely with management.
Shareholders are in the long term scheme but at first it was as rubes to be taken advantage of and then later on I believe they are intended to be the people that drive the common stock to its ultimate highs and get fleeced again (like the 08 folks). Longs can still make money here, as always, by hoping to cling to Winfield's back as he rises in the next cycle. That's fine and I think it will work. Just instead of going to $50 a share we will only do maybe 5-10 because so much upside has been undermined and leached from shareholders over time. Winfield will buy tropical islands and some shareholders will still be down from 2008 and we may never reach our all time high again, or not for many, many, years. Hopefully I am wrong (I want to be, since I still have a small % of what I used to own here). Like one of the other posters said $2k gold makes up for a lot of mistakes. But all gold projects should be able to make money at current prices and not hope for some pie in the sky price that may, or may not happen.
Take care.
