Primary Text Frame

I am in the process of converting a couple hundred page word doc file into an indesign file, one chapter at a time. An adobe instructor led me to use the "place" function for "easy" (ha) conversion from word doc. As expected, this creates a roughly 8 page document as a starting point. Throughout, we insert page breaks to meet our needs of spacing it out to our liking (spacing is highly custom with images and design). 

That context said, the rolling text frame has been complicating for two reasons: 

1. When I want to add several line breaks, say to accomodate for an image placement, some of the text bumps to the next page, naturally. That is ok, but all of the images stay stationary. (They are not embedded in the text box). This gets compilcated when I want to drastically change the layout. I have to manually move all the images from page to page from that point to the end. Very frustrating. 

2. We are in the necessary habit of  "duplicating" pages when we want to play with a couple of different ways to layout the page or a couple of different images we want to experiment with. With the rolling text box/primary text frame, this has become very confusing. The duplicated page functions independenly from the original page (with the rolling feature). So if I want to keep/save the duplicated page layout, I would delete the original page, but that doesn't actually delete the text because it is rolling. (I'd like to retain the ability to do this as we often have multiple ideas to compare, or if we make big changes to the page--we like to easily go back to how it was by duplicating first and creating a backup.)

All this to say, the rolling text frame is excellent, but only for placement. When I am in design mode, it has become extremely unfavorable. Is there a way to freeze all the text frames so to speak-- making them all independent and no longer linked? I like the feature for import, but not design. 

Head is spinning. Thanks in advance for any tips.