How can I easily enter Compare view after Importing from a Catalog with "create virtual copy"?

I once again beckon the Adobe wizards of this forum, and woud like to thank you all upfront for your help!

EDIT: This post was initially written before I discovered the "preserve old settings as a virtual copy" option. I am leaving that original post up, at the bottom of this post, in order to have some frame of reference for where I'm coming from. Though I hope what immediately preceeds will concisely explain my current question:

I've imported a bunch of file from another catalog, and preserved the old settings as a virtual copy. So now in the "Previous Import" folder, I'm shown all the imported images, with a little "2" in the top left of the thumbnail, of course in reference to the virtual copy which was created to preserve any pre-existing edits. My question now is, is there any way to, in the least amount of clicks possible... open up Compare View? it seems I cannot do it from within the Previous Import folder that I am shown after import, despite the thumbnail corner "2" referencing this virtual copy. Normally with a virtual copy, I can click that number to expand and contract the stack, thus in this case, that would make it possible to compare the images right from this Previous Import folder. I understand in theory that the Virtual Copy is not a previous import, so perhaps is that way its not letting me expand the stack to see it from here? Must I manually navigate to the folder where the image lives, and instead select both images from there in order to enter Compare View? I've got hundreds of images to review, and so it will be quite cumbersome to have to do this extra step for every single image (most of which live in seperate dated folders in this catalog). Thank you.

Original post:

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So I am importing from, lets call it Catalog2, into my current catalog, lets call it Catalog1.

A portion of the Catalog2 images are new to Catalog1 entirely, and thus the import is straightforward.

The other portion of images in Catalog2 makes this process a little more confusing for me. These images already exist in Catalog 1, though in most cases, I woud like to override the image edits, if any, that exist in Catalog 1 with those from Catalog2. Note that I said "in most cases".

Were I to be certain that want to overide every single image edit (without needing to manually evaluate the edits of any given dupe image in Catalog1 against its corresponding edit Catalog2), I believe this would be a fairly straightforward process. I would simply Import from Catalog, and then in the import popup, under "Changed Existing Photos", I would select "metadata and develop settings only" or "metadata, develop settings, and negative files" and proceed with the import. However in my current case, it is possible that I would like to discard edits on certain images from Catalog2 in favor of their Catalog1 versions, and vice versa.

My issue with all of this is that I cannot seem to figure out a way to manually review the differences between Catalog1 and Catalog2 dupes so that I can make this decision. It seems to be an all or nothing decision that I must make from the Import From Catalog popup. This is unfortunate.

The best way (although not was ideal as being automatically presented with something akin to Compare View from within this Import From Catalog popup) I can imagine would be if, Ideally, I could untick a "Don't import suspected duplicates" button from this Import From Catalog popup (as I can during a normal import), and then for File Handling, select "Add New Photos to Catalog Without Moving", proceed with the import, and then just either use Compare View or navigate back and forth between the instance of the file that came from the Catalog2 import against the pre-existing Catalog1 instance, assess which edit I want to keep, discard the other, and move on.

If anyone has any insights for me I would greatly appreciate it.

(P.S. oh, and btw, side note, that Replace option under Changed Existing Photos to replace "Metadata, develop settings, and negative files"....why is that "negative files" option even there? If its an exsiting file in the first place, why would anyone ever need to replace the negative file, which lightroom never alters in the first place?)