What is it? Barium is an alkaline rare-earth metal with an atomic number of 56. It has a number of salts. The sulfate salt is non-toxic and does not dissolve in water. Soluble salts are all toxic. This includes, but is not limited to the following: “Barium acetate, barium nitrate, barium...
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If that was really a "better" method it'd be more discussed already imo.
If it was a bad method it would've also been discussed and discarded already.
It's not discussed much because no one really tried it much yet, I'd say that's cause of the availability and reliability of SN left little use in exploring other chemical elements, now that SN is getting worse in availability it might be worth taking a look at those.
Not everything "better" has already been found. (In other fields as well)
We are constantly learning and discovering new methods to achieve our goals and sometimes those are things that have been around for hundreds of years but somehow just never got tried, that happens a lot in the industry where there are good alternatives available but never used since there already are cheap and reliable methods available.
A good example are CFC's and HCFC's you know the ones that were commonly used as cheap refrigerents or propellants, it's only when the need for alternatives arose due to prohibition of those gases that we even began to look into alternatives.