With respect to your wishes, please understand that this post is not intended to agitate you nor put you on the defensive. My aim in this post is to help you see the subject from another angle, and also show you how to accomplish the same goal as you started out with ...
You say "resistance is futile". It goes both ways.
Your store HAS already a complete database. Why are you wanting to trash that?
Why are you equating "upgrade" with "i gotta throw it all away"?
There are two parts to your site: the database, which contains all your data and your configuration settings, and your sales rules and shipping strategies and payment methods; and then there's the PHP files which contain the core software logic and your customized template and language text.
The database-upgrade part is the simplest. It takes between 30 and 150 seconds. So stop trying to throw away your database after wasting hours with trying to figure out how to export/import customer and then products and then orders and then whatever the heck else you think you need to export over to some other place.
The PHP files are separate. And if you've changed a lot of things in them and you want to throw all THAT away, feel free. Of course, that means you're starting all over without any frame of reference on what things you need to "redo" in the new version (based on your strategy of starting over from scratch without even looking at your old site files).
Simplify your fear-of-the-unknown:
- compare all your customized language files against the originals (ya, just like the upgrade docs say to do). THIS WILL GIVE YOU ALL THE TEXT CHANGES YOU NEED TO DO IN YOUR NEW SITE. And, if you use WinMerge, you can literally copy individual customized lines over from old-to-new if you want to actually save yourself hours of time and guesswork. Or ... don't. Just figure out all the language-file changes from scratch by hand all over again. I choose the easier way of comparing, since WinMerge does it in about ... lemme count ... 1 2 3 4 seconds. Done. That was faster than finding the text in the Developers Toolkit, which only takes 5-6 seconds including typing.
Seriously, that's the majority of the work, because you already said you're throwing away your old template, and thus don't need to compare those files.
So, then your new template takes care of the templating part.
And bam, you're basically done.
Why do all those hours of picking out customers and products to export, and fiddling with guessing which files to change "hello" to "hi" in, and so on?
The upgrade instructions may look dauntingly complicated, but that's just because they're written from the perspective of saving you from yourself.
Break it down into the smaller parts and it's really not a big deal.
The "big deal" comes where you've changed the core code business logic with custom features and want to "keep" those custom features. But your post reads as though you don't care about those custom features anymore (you said you're throwing away the old and starting with a brand new one, which implies ignoring the custom code you say you believe is impossible to upgrade), so ... why is this so complicated again?
So ... I don't "get" what you mean by "I cannot upgrade".
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