Rebuilding a container that's full? Easy, just Ctrl click and drag to the garbage the entire content of the container. As long as the infrastructure to build more is there, that's not a problem.
Reconstructing a splitter can be turn out to be quite a bit more work as far as I'm concerned. They don't mind placing under a conveyor belt, but they complain as soon as you try placing anything under them, which means that you have to build them in a top down manner. The end result is that if you ever have to rebuild anything around that splitter, you end up having to take down the entire thing and rebuild it from scratch.
You should see some of the tight spaces I've got. They would give you nightmares.