Oh yeah, much easier to harvest the seeds that way. I bought a huge grinder that I use to harvest them now. I just chop the plant whole and hang it up to dry. When its dry...and I mean dry, I start cutting buds off and run them through the grinder carefully. All the seeds just drop out of the holes and roll down to where I collect them. Then when most the seeds stop dropping, I grind like I would with just regular herb. Every once in a while I hear a seed drop later, but most of them drop out before any of the flower. I save the flower for oils after grinding it up.
I used to try to harvest sooner, but if you harvest the seeds too fast and you don't dry them, they can actually mold like buds. So to not take any chance, I just let the plant do a full plant dry. Takes a couple weeks to fully dry. I have enough to keep me busy that i don't mind waiting for them to dry. Also, If I don't want to harvest all the seeds right away, I put the seeded buds in jars and cure like regular buds. I have 2-3 jars of seeded Northern Lights x Harlequin buds left to de-seed still. I grab a jar every once in a while and will grind up a few rounds of buds to slowly whittle away at the pile. Kind of lets me do it at my leisure or need. And again, nothing gets wasted. All the fans get put into the soil to compost, any sugar leaves or trim go into oil, and all ground up buds will either go to oil, edibles, topicals, or smoked. Then I compost root ball back into future run soils.
