Recombine project I split in 2 without duplicate materials

#1

I had a project that got too heavy, so I split it in 2 and worked out the halves separately.

I’m ready to recombine it, but realizing now that recombining will leave me with duplicate materials. Since each set has lots of automation tied to it, I can’t just swap it out.

Is there a way to either combine without duplicating materials but keeping automation intact, or to combine with duplicates, but easily swap out duplicates while keeping material automations intact?

#2

You can replace materials by alt-dragging and dropping one on top of the other, but this is a destructive operation.