I'll be honest: high energy physics isn't really an area where "hunches" carry a lot of weight, at least if those hunches aren't grounded in a pretty thorough u

I'll be honest: high energy physics isn't really an area where "hunches" carry a lot of weight, at least if those hunches aren't grounded in a pretty thorough understanding of particle physics and general relativity. The language of "pinching off into new strings" is of course largely an analogy, one which captures some of the mathematical features of string interactions reasonably well while probably obscuring others. What's really going on underneath that analogy is just as "abstractly mathematical" as you could ask for: a (boundary?) conformal field theory defined on the 1+1-dimensional string world sheet, which allows just a single unique self-consistent mode of interaction. It is complicated, but honestly, so is standard quantum field theory when you really dig into it, and if you're familiar with the underlying math and physics this description is surprisingly elegant.