exporting settings from catalog

is there anyway to just simply export the .cos settings files from a catalog?!?! 

I've got a catalog I've been updating occasionally with personal family photos since COP8, all images are referenced in my own folder structure, no collections are used. I just navigate to the respective folder in the library with the "show folder hierarchy" checked.

At this point the catalog is super messed up and at some point I apparently double imported thousands of images trying to get it set back up after transferring files to a new hard drive and the locate function wasn't working correctly. All of these point to the same folder, and have the same settings and metadata applied. I want to just make a new catalog or session and import everything into it, but it seems like I'll loose all my settings.

Do I really have no option other than:

1)manually delete every other photo for thousands of images spread over who knows how many folders. (entire catalog is 65k images, with maybe 1/3 or 1/4 of those being duplicates)

2) make a new session or catalog, and just accept that I'm going to loose all my settings

3)export originals, each folder individually manually, delete the originals from the temp folder I make for this, and then manually copy the "captureone/settings" folder that it makes with this back to the original originals folder (keeping in mind this will duplicate TB's of data uselessly) 

please tell me theres a simpler option, this is absurd.  why can't it just simply export the .cos files back into the source folder like it does with sessions??

someone please tell me I'm wrong, I've spent days trying to figure this out.