Pburt16, that’s a problem with the systems that are importing the data or the tools you’re using for the data migration, not a responsibility of Shopify. Export the data using Matrixify, massage it, and then import what you want.
Migrating data from one platform to a variety of other platforms is not a basic feature. At a minimum, you have to qualify which data will be migrated, you have to map fields between systems, and you have to address business logic like item state.
I realize you’re trying to emphasize the need for the original request, but conflating or dramatizing the problem makes it more difficult to solve and less likely that we will ever get any help.
We don’t want archived products to show up by default in the admin interface. Or put differently, we want archived products to be handled just like archived orders.