Importing passwords into 1Password nothing but a headache. Don't do it. Start completely fresh.

I merged something like 2 * 200 = 400 items over the course of a week . Now my password database is correct, clean and comprehensive and contains about 150 login entries.
While doing this, I changed every password where I didn't already have a truly unique and random password. This was a long due required cleanup, but not related to a migration to 1Password. I just did it, because I was going over every entry anyway.

You're definitely right about the turn off this is for new customers. I was thinking of moving my girlfriend over as she really needs a password manager but she'd never be able to manage these problems.

Wow! That's quite a process to have to go through, especially if you have many to deal with. On my latest try on one site with only 1 login from Chrome, I told it I'd forgotten the password, clicked the link to change it, opened 1Password to create and copy a new generated password, copied the password into the site window and found it hadn't copied the new password into the confirm password fields. When I went back to 1Password to get the password again, it generated another password which of course didn't match so I copied the password from the confirmation field into the first field and logged in. Then went back to 1Password to confirm it had changed the password but 1Password still had the very old password that I was originally trying to change so now i don't know what password is in the site login. Guess I'll have to try again.

You're right that 1Password doesn't provide a good workflow for initial import and cleaning up the imported entries. That's something that can be improved and something that might prevent potential customers from making a switch from their old password manager.

My personal workflow for doing this was like this:

• I imported from my previous password manager (PasswordSafe) and Chrome into separate vaults
• most entries had duplicates - one older from PasswordSafe but with more secondary info, one more recent (Chrome) with current passwords
• I created a vault called "cleaned up items"
• I created a view that included the two import vaults but not the "cleaned up items" vault
• I changed to the "all objects" category in that view, so all imported, but not cleaned up items were shown
• sorted the "all objects" view by title
• I took the first item of that list and copied the password, then searched for entries with the same password. If there were duplicates, I merged them, tried to login to the corresponding website, and finally moved the cleaned up item to the vault for cleaned up items
• the same for items with different passwords but for the same site (most of them appeared next to each other due to the sorting by title)
• repeat with the new first item

This way, the list of items to clean did get shorter and shorter until I processed them all. Then I moved all items from the "cleaned up items" vault to the personal vault, deleted the 2 now empty import vaults, and that was it.