Strange because I have (longstanding) standaloneVMs
with Qubes tools installed which work fine.
I cant see that pastebin, so I’m not clear what your issue is.
I’ll try from fresh and see if I can diagnose the problem.
The template switch hack is clever, but must be a pain to work. In the
absence of anything else it would do.
An alternative approach would be to attach disks at startup and use
those to transfer files between qubes - you could use a physical disk
(USB) or a disk image, either works fine.