Unfortunately it is not possible to upgrade to full VW3 first because there is no secure version of 3.x available. It was EOL before a number of security vulnerabilities were discovered, and was thereafter removed from the Members area, per the policy regarding security vulnerabilities. At that point, VW3 Lite had not been available for download for several years, so it was a surprise to find someone still using it.
The only upgrade path available for such cases is to full VW4, but as I have mentioned that is a rare and untested case. There are errors, as we have seen.
The 4.0.8 importer should now be more forgiving when it comes to minor errors, but I still expect database errors when tables and other fields don't exist in the source Lite version.