The main problem with Lime survey is that groups and questions have all different IDs. If you copy a survey, the survey ID will change (and this is normal) but all the question IDs and the group IDs will also change.

This way of working makes Lime more difficult to integrate with outside applications. It also prevents having features like a bank of questions which one could pick into.

Example: I am passing company name parameter from another application (my ERP for instance) to a given question in one survey. I will use the SGQA Identifier which will be for instance 12345X1X1001.
Now, if I duplicate the survey into another one, and simply need to change two or 3 questions, lime will necessarily rename the survey ID (which is normal), but will also change the group ID and all question ID. What I passed to 12345X1X1001 will now need to be passed to 54321X2X1002 for instance. This means that from the external application, I must maintain a different map per survey - which is time consuming.

If Lime would not automatically increment the group and question numbers, passing (and retrieving) parameters would be far easier because only the survey ID would need to be changed. This would mean that the company name of all of my surveys could be passed to DDDDDX1X1001 with DDDDD being the survey ID to point to. In that situation, I would be able to copy the map of a survey to the next and simply change the mapping for questions which have truly changed versus the original survey copy.

I understand there might not be an easy way of achieving such purpose, at least I wanted to place that rationale in the pool of ideas as it is important for Lime to be integrable with other tools. I believe its current structure is a barrier towards that objective.