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Good points. Most, but not all, of the details you listed I have read - though not the r-process in detail. They have been fundamental in nuclear engineering since Gamow’s first papers in 1937-38. (And he was the author of my primary nuclear engineering texts used in 1974-1978, with more university level classes 1978-1983.) Gold is difficult to “fabricate” because it is on the wrong side (the lowering binding energy side of the curve above the most stable isotopes of Fe and Ni. To make the conventional nucleosynthesis process of gold even more difficult, you must also fabricate neutron-rich isotopes and allow them to decay “down” into all of the elements between U238 and Fe.

The more fundamental problem above these details is resolving the issue about total number of collisions needed to create that final isotope of gold we mine from the earth’s crust. And every isotope of iron, Ca, Ne, Oxygen, Carbon, etc. All these need to be created as well.

But - all of the individual fusion details conceded - they have all been confirmed in the labs, many I have done myself - we can account for between 144,000 and 158,000 tonnes of gold already mined from the earth’s crust. That’s 9.48 x 10^34 gold atoms mined - more, obviously, have been created since the Big Bang but not mined yet.

How do you reconcile the need for more than 3.8 x 10^36 collisions in less than 9 billion (9x10^9) years between the Big Bang and the formation of the solar system? You are requiring more than 10^19 supernova-caused fusions per second for every second for every year for 10^9 years ...

And that assumes every fusion ever happening is 100% production, and that no gold atom is lost between stars as interstellar dust.

Now, after you have “built” all of the gold we have mined, you still need to “build” all of the iron, carbon, nickle, magnesium, calcium, .... Because every supernova-caused fusion of He that went towards building those 10^39 gold isotopes, did not build a single carbon, neon, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium isotope.