Two quotes about shattering plates:
“It’s like if you had a porcelain plate with a picture of an Italian city,” said Hendrik Schatz (opens a new tab), a nuclear astrophysicist at FRIB. If you wanted a piece with just one house on it, you’d have to break a lot of plates before you got the right picture. “We’re shattering a trillion plates per second.”
Its isotopes are even tricker to isolate; if fragmentation during the i-process is like capturing a picture of a house from a shattered plate, then the r-process means picking out only the window.
I'm thinking if it is a right analogy? Wouldn't it be easier to get a specific smaller piece? I mean there are more details on a bigger piece that should be preserved all, while a smaller piece will have fewer details, so the probability of this should be higher, shouldn't it?
I think the analogy here is that it’s indeed easier to get any smaller piece, but it’s harder to get a specific smaller piece you want.
Without reading the article I visualized the analogies mentioned in these comments as a house that you still have the potential to get several windows out of reliably, and importantly - you wouldn’t be missing a corner from an otherwise perfect window.
The house soaks up environmental damage to keep identifiable windows intact, vs a pile of mostly broken / not-up-to-spec windows.