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The model on SE was moderation, not curation. Nothing was ever removed. Duplicates, were marked, but never resolved. The only way and kind of curation occurred at all was through voting, and voting was not based on the expertise of the voter. Bad advice was supposed to sink to the bottom of the page, and good advice to rise to the top, through voting. But this assumed that the mass of voters were reliable arbiters of quality and accuracy. 

It did not always work. Votes often went to the first answer posted, while the question was fresh and attracting eyeballs. A much better answer posted a week later would have very little chance of ever rising to the top because the question would just not get as many views a week after it was posted, and many would not read all the way down to the new answer if they were satisfied with the inferior but highly rated answer at the top. This effect tended to be worse for writing than for more technical stacks, because most of the answers are not provable mechanically in the way programming answers are, for instance. 

No model is perfect, of course. But I think that the questions you raise about handling the old content really come down to this distinction between curation and moderation. Moderators deal with behavior. Curators deal with content. Anything we do with the imported content is curation. 

No method of managing content is perfect. Community curation through voting is an interesting model, and clearly performs well in some cases. But it also clearly leads to the accumulation of an immense amount of duplication and cruft. And to start the process over again for a body of content as large as this will clearly mean that it will be months, and perhaps years, before the curation effect of voting really kicks in. 

So if you really want to do anything with the current content, what you are really talking about is curation. And maybe that is not such a bad thing. Vast numbers of poor answers, silly questions, and duplicate questions and answers could be removed with little controversy by a reasonable curator or team of curators. 

That curation effort would yield a site that is far easier to navigate, and thus far more useful and more likely to attract traffic. Fixing up question titles so that they actually reflected the question asked -- making them actually be questions -- would, by itself, make a huge difference. 

And maybe it is worth thinking about whether active curation, alone or in combination with voting, should be a permanent feature of the new site. After all, if you want to draw traffic to this site, despite it having fewer numbers of active users, making it easier to use would be a good draw. 

But if we go that route, it seems to me that curators and moderators should be two distinct roles. Moderators should be focussed on behavior and the topics that are active right now. Curators should probably not get involved until the questions have cooled a little, and they should deal strictly with the content.