This article focuses on spallation reactions, i.e. interactions of energetic nucleons, basically with a kinetic energy in the 100MeV to a few GeV range, with a target nucleus. These processes are described rather successfully by the so-called Intranuclear Cascade (INC) plus evaporation models. They can be viewed as a first stage of nucleon-nucleon collisions, ejecting fast particles, followed by evaporation of slow particles from the target remnant. These cascade + evaporation models have, now, globally reached a high level of predictive power, owing in particular to successive research programs. The present work, which is an outcome of one of these programs, the recent European Union ANDES research program, deals with a set of reactions (or observable quantities), which can be due to a single collision, such as the one-nucleon removal reactions or the quasi-elastic elastic process. A survey of the experimental data is presented, which allows to clearly point out that, often, the INC models are unsatisfactory for the description of these peculiar events, whereas they are rather successful for the rest of the experimental data. This paradoxical situation is tentatively related to quasi-particle effects which are neglected in INC models.