Using For Each loop to point deform emitted vellum objects

[bentway23]

My brain is having an issue here. I have a vellum sim that emits a new piece of geo every x frames. I need to take the final simmed geo (tet softbodies) and point deform the original hires geo. This wouldn't be hard to do the old brute-force way--by the end only four instances have emitted--but I feel like this is something a for each loop would be perfect for.

The image attached shows my attempted setup (it's part of a much bigger project, not practical to upload). I bring in the cached sim and blast the elements I don't want for this step. I ran it through an assemble node (because I thought doing for-each named primitive would do the trick here, no success yet, though, so this might be unnecessary). Then there's a wrangle that takes the creation frame (from the vellum path name) and converts it to an integer "num" attribute, which (theoretically) a time shift could read to know what frame to freeze the simmed and source geo to get them to match up and then do a point deform inside the for each loop. (The reason I have to time shift the source geo is that the geo going into the vellum sim was rotating so that each emitted object would come in at a different angle. I referenced copied those transforms to the hires geo so they match in time and space for the beginning of the point deform.)

The first (maybe last?) problem I'm having is that I can't get the time shift to harmonize with the for each loop. It's reading the attribute correctly and behaves right outside of the loop. Some other Googling indicates that it has to be connected to the node before the loop, but then I'm having trouble isolating which object to freeze. I've seen similar questions on various posts, but none seem to quite answer what I'm looking for here (or I'm just not bright enough to translate the fixes).

Thanks for any guidance on this!