Big Migration equals big headaches

So lets say you have a single site with 50 pages and you are looking to move from Content Management System X to DNN/Evoq.  Easy enough, bring up one site on one monitor and the DNN/Evoq site on another and spend a couple days copy/pasting.  Oh if life were only that simple!

We're looking at moving sites with hundreds to thousands of pages so a manual copy/paste of content just isn't going to do it.  So now I'm writing, from scratch, a migration tool to try and move content from SharePoint 2013 to DNN/Evoq.  I knew going into it that this wouldn't be easy, business make their fortunes writing these types of things, but I have pulled almost every rabbit out of the hat in making this go and I'm coming to one conclusion.

Content Management Systems don't want you to leave so they don't make it easy for you to go.  Now granted in this case getting information out of SharePoint isn't proving nearly as hard as putting information into DNN/EVOQ.  You see the web-based CMS's are designed for you to do everything through the browser and I'm trying to script and code.  Just not what they were made for.

So here is where I have been and where I might go.

1. Export from SharePoint and "call" the "create page" from the DNN/EVOQ API to create the pages...  this failed because it's very difficult because it's not just one API call to create a page and it's not documented AT ALL.
   
2. Export from SharePoint and "insert" into the database directly for DNN/EVOQ.  I'm a database guy so this should have been easy.  Problem is the database seems to be uber-normalized and a single change can sometimes need multiple rounds trips to the same table. So doing it reliably without wrecking the whole system is very tricky
   
3. Export from SharePoint and "create" a "Export" package that DNN/EVOQ can process using their own "Import" wizard to bring in just pages and content.  so far this looks like the most bulletproof method and I'm making baby steps toward it.  I've got the actual file that holds all the "page" info and am just running into trouble with DNN/EVOQ parsing it during the "import" pre-check.
   
4. This may be where I end up, I just found a project that utilizes the new DNNPrompt API.  This API actually has a command called "New Page" and can be called from powershell.  I know that the #3 solution will probably lead to further enhancement and give me more options, but this powershell route MAY be a stopgap to just get going.  If I can't get the parsing of my package to work then this may be where I end up

So the journey continues and should I figure out a path I will be posting my solution so hopefully it will help others regardless of if you're moving toward DNN or Evoq we all need a way to bring in our data and not all of us are blessed with small sites that manual effort is enough.

Let me know your thoughts and if you've come up against this before. Looking forward to hearing your horror and success stories with migrations large and small.