Maya's shatters scripts pretty good, I wouldent say its outdated, theres not really anything thats out there otherwise (blastcodes agreat one) that crackme looks like it uses boolians, which can cause problems.

If you want to make it look random when it explodes, use the shatter, but if you want it to be uniform, juswt seperate the faces as you said.... than use rigids and a keyed radial field.