There is no guarantee that the grade at A1 will increase with...

There is no guarantee that the grade at A1 will increase with depth. The only way to find out is with drilling holes, unfortunately with narrow vein hosted gold deposits it is very hit and miss .
The richest vein/reef at A1 was the Victory reef extending from the 14 level down to the 17 level and averaged well over 30g/t for the ten years it was mined.
What CTL and A1 Consolidated are and  trying to do or hoping to do is for the narrow (<1.0m) high grade reefs to be rich enough to be mined with the low grade dyke (between 0.5g/t to 2.0g/t) in a bulk tonnage mining method. For this to be successful the brecciated or stockwork dyke has to be at least 2.0g/t and the narrow quartz reefs within the dyke needs to be 20g/t .
Trucking costs are purely related to distance carted and tonnes. Grade of the ore in the trucks is irrelevant in trucking costs.
I don't know much about Union Hill mine except what is in the reports.  It is possible that A1 Consolidated bought the Mill at Union Hill and the mine was part of the deal. Gandel and Grey may have been happy to flog the Union Hill mine off to get into the A1 Mine. OK that was a conspiracy theory i just thought of while typing this.
Grey being the Geologist should have known how good or bad the mine was.
To answer some of your other queries. There are 3 types of geologist. Exploration geologist which simply  researches  an area and takes surveys, samples and drills holes. A mining geologist works in operating mines and directs the miners/engineers in areas to be mined and  keeping control of the grades being mined. The third type is an Office geo, usually all talk no action or responsibility and writes in annual reports, unfortunately you have to have some mining/geology knowledge to be able to  read between the lines and sort the crap from the real story.
I was being facetious about Ashok P, however a few years back Macpersons Reward were very gung ho about a silver deposit near Kalgoorlie called Nimbus, the best thing since sliced bread, guess what, nothing ever came from all the talk and who did all the reporting? M Goodz an ex director of A1 Conslidated. A classic case of an office geologist.
Just for interest there is book by Howard Coombes and Brian Lloyd called "Gold at Gaffneys creek". well worth a read.

If your read some of the old Octagonal reports, they were strapped for cash and Gandel put money in, sold the mine and mill to A1 then delisted or privatized Octagonal. Ring any bells?