I’m going to guess that the answer to this question is “if it works for you then don’t worry about it” but I thought I would put it out there anyway.
The first all grain batch I brewed was something I ordered from morebeer.com and had them crush it. I don’t recall seeing broken grains, they all seemed intact.
After that I got my grain from the local shop and this is how it was crushed:
Does that seem excessive? I didn’t have any stuck sparge issue but I did go over the estimated pre-boil gravity by 5 points (add to that greater than expected boil-off and the OG was 8 points higher than expected).
That looks like a very good crush to me. It’s hard to tell from a picture but it looks a bit courser than I crush. I tend to get very close to stuck sparges though. As long as the husks are mostly intact it looks great.
I’m not sure how to interpret “I don’t recall seeing broken grains”. Crushed/broken grain sounds the same to me. Either way, the crushed grain in the picture looks good.
When I looked at the first grains I thought “oh no, they didn’t crush them” but on closer inspection they looked like that they were just squeezed open. I could be mistaken, though, it was several weeks ago.
Great! I honestly had no idea what a good crush looked like.