In my new (new to me) home, I have noticed that the rubber "fingers" in the drain that block spoons, forks, small children, and other such items from falling into the garbage disposer are worn and are no longer blocking the drain effectively.

My initial research seems to suggest that the only way to replace the rubber "fingers" is to replace the entire disposer sink flange, which will entain breaking perfectly good seals and removing my garbage disposer so that I can install a new sink flange. This seems to be a lot of trouble and to risk damaging the perfectly good sink and disposer to fix a simple thing.

Am I missing another more straight-forward way of repairing the problem?

Thanks and take care . . .