Thanks for this Pat. This reminds me that a good next step for my script (and my programming in general) would be to incorporate functions 
Yes, the problem with item[type=“gls”] arises when there is more than one gloss, which is often the case for anyone working in a region with a lingua franca that is not English. Simply further specifying for lang=“en” should suffice.
It looks like in your script you parsed free translations by matching for item[type=“lit”]. I don’t think I’ve seen this attribute value in flextext files before - perhaps this is an older flextext standard?
You are right that there are many features of FLEx which are probably used at a low frequency, and incorporating all of them into a conversion script would take some time. But it would be great if someone did it!
I’ll add another comment on this over in the JSON in the Middle thread.