[apo]

It's not really a question of hard way vs easy way. It's more like the difference between having a balloon filled with helium and making a single helium atom in a collider. One you can buy at the grocery store, the other requires a team of trained scientists and a facility full of equipment.

A milllimole (10^20 moleculess) is considered small scale by many chemists. Working with a single molecule as described in the artice is just short of science fiction, and hardly any chemists have ever done it. It requires one of the most expensive instruments in the world.