Other ways to accomplish Migration Assistant-like tasks?

Question

So, you know, kids get older, one goes off to college, the others want their own computer accounts instead of a single "Kids" account, etc. And then you get a new iMac...
"Ah..." I thought, "Perfect opportunity to clean up the account structure and make things clean again..."
So instead of running Migration Assistant from the outset, I configured the new iMac first. Create the User accounts, install the anti-virus SW, get everything set up the way I want.
Next, I try out the Migration Assistant... Surprise surprise, even if I just want to use it to copy the Documents folder of one account on the old machine to an account on the new machine, it pops messages about replacing the existing account on the new machine and blah, blah, blah.
Uh... no... that's not what I intended. I just want to suck over Documents, eMail, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie libraries, bookmarks, address book contacts... I don't want to replace accounts! I have the new accounts set up the way I want them already...
So what do I do instead? Do I have to do each of these steps manually at this point? Do I have to export bookmarks, push them to the Dropbox on the new machine, import them, export contacts, push them to the Dropbox on the new machine, import them, copy Documents through the Dropbox in a two-step process, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum?
Or is there some easier way to do this that's better thought-out than the Migration Assistant, which apparently wants to replace accounts wholesale and won't even let you copy stuff into the currently-logged-in account?
Or is the easiest thing just to nuke the new machine's configuration, let the Migration Assistant blast it's way mindlessly through whatever it does, and then start deleting and reconfiguring the new machine OVER AGAIN?
Thanks for any suggestions,
Rodney
27" iMac Core i7 2.93 GHz, Mac OS X (10.6.4), 8GB / 17" flat panel iMac G4, 1 GHz, Max OS X (10.5.11), 768MB

Answer 1

I suggest that you start all over again, using Setup Assistant after restoring the new iMac to factory original conditions, & migrate only the user account(s) you want to keep on it from any older Macs you have.
There are several good reasons Setup/Migration Assistant will not do what you want:
1. It is undesirable for privacy & security reasons -- there would be no point in having separate user accounts protected by passwords if someone could use the utility simply to copy whatever they wanted from another user's account into their own. As far as the computer is concerned, each user account is a separate entity, entitled to the same level of privacy & security.
2. Each user account has its own user preferences, application settings, & so on. There can be several thousand of these items for each user account. There is no way to merge them into one user account, so at best an account merge function would tediously have to ask which of these you wanted retained & which ones you wanted discarded on an item by item basis.
3. Many popular apps (among them Mail, iTunes, iPhoto, & many browsers) save user data in application-specific master files or databases rather than in individual files. Again, there can be only one of these (at a time) for each user. (For example, while iTunes stores song files individually, user ratings, notes, & other user-specific items are stored in iTunes database files, one per user.) Since each application that does this has its own unique methods & formats, Setup/Migration Assistant would have to know about all of them to somehow merge them into one user account's master or database files, assuming that would even be possible to do without conflicts.
The tips Pondini provided are the best you can do.
Message was edited by: R C-R