Hey James, I would approach it in a different way, check it out:
first of all, packed rigid bodies act like particles so you can use the pop wind instead of the wind force (and all the other pop forces, this give us a lot of forces varieties)
Here's how you can set this up:
To make statement run multiple times it must be inside the dop network (use a popwrangle for this)
Idk how to make the pieces scale up or down using vex (never thought of that) so I would do it using the primitive sop.
To use the primitive sop you will need a sop solver. To use the sop solver with the bullet solver you must connect both using a Multi Solver (I know, it looks complex but it's a very common technique, you will see yourself doing a lot of multisolvers in th future)
Here's how it should looks like:
Inisde the sop solver you can set things like this and use the scale parameter to scale individual pieces based on some other attribute (age in this situation)
(Inside the sop solver you can do stuff you'd do in sop context, affecting the dop net stuff)
It looks like it's working fine now, I hope it can makes some things clear for you
Cheers,
Alvaro
Plant Debris scale_fix_02.hipnc