How to split one bilingual blog in two single language one?

Greetings.

About one and a half year ago I migrated to wordpress this bilingual website: https://stop.zona-m.net using the WPML plugin.

Recently I have realized that:
– WPML doesn’t do all I need:
– I found no way to use language-dependent widgets. For example, if you go to the italian version https://stop.zona-m.net/it/ you should NOT see the english rss feed from the Strider website
– there is no automatic category “translation”, that there is no link inserted from e.g english category https://stop.zona-m.net/category/digiworld/ to the italian equivalent https://stop.zona-m.net/it/category/digimondo/ . Ditto for tags

– probably, no matter how cool how it looks, I don’t really need the link with the nice flags between english and italian version of the same post (meaning that in practice almost no visitor uses them, almost all readers use only one language

– WPML has gone commercial/proprietary

For all the reasons above I am seriously considering splitting that website in two monolanguage wordpress installs (it runs on a VPS so I can add databases, change apache settings and son as much as I want).

What gave me this idea is the fact that I do want more flexibility on each language than WPML (regardless of price/license) may give, but I also do NOT want to “lose” the italian URLs.

Now, all the italian content (home page, tags, categories, posts) has the /it suffix. I would therefore like to move all of it to a separate wordpress install. Today I have:

https://stop.zona-m.net points to /var/www/stop-wordpress (bilingual)

Tomorrow, I’d like to have:

https://stop.zona-m.net points to /var/www/stop-wordpress (EN-only)
https://stop.zona-m.net/it points to /var/www/stop-wordpress-it (IT-only, all the URls are the same as they are today with the WPML bilingual install)

I *think* that to get there I should:

1. clone current mysql database stop -> stop-it
2. cp -r -p /var/www/stop-wordpress /var/www/stop-wordpress-it
3. change /var/www/stop-wordpress-it/wp-config.php to point to stop-it
4. modify apache config so that https://stop.zona-m.net/it points to /var/www/stop-wordpress-it
5. modify wordpress config so that wordpress (using the cloned database!) regenerates italian URLs equal to the old ones
6. delete all italian posts from english install, all english posts from italian install

The last step, I can do manually, if there is no other way to do it. What I need help with is to know if I’m missing something and above all how to do exactly step 5

TIA,
Marco