Not being a PHP guru, I have given up trying to figure out why the import/export function of WP didn’t work correctly. After an exhaustive search of the forums, it seems to be a bug. It could also be related to the very reason I decided to start a fresh install of WP. In my first attempt, I was able to import 2005-2007. This is exactly where I encountered problems a couple years ago (and ever since) with upgrading WP versions.
Luckily, the old archive page was rendered with the full links so I was able to just copy/paste into a new page here. This neatly solves the problem w/o a whole lot of fuss!

