Issue with piped text because of QIDs changing when copying a survey to library

I have built a long and complex survey that members of our team use for different projects, which they can customize in specific ways based on the project. They don't have to understand or change the inner workings of the survey. To this end, I have created a template of the survey that they can copy and tweak. To prevent that they accidentally change the 'master' survey, I copied the survey to the Survey Library so that they can create a new survey based on that template.
However, the problem is that Qualtrics seems to change the QIDs of the questions with each new instance of the survey. Instead of QID1, QID2, etc., the numbers become something very large like QID1278723. What's more, these numbers are different for each new instance. This is a problem because in later parts of the survey it uses Javascript to retrieve answers given earlier, using piped text, e.g.: "${q://1_QID19/SelectedChoicesRecode}"
Since QID19 is not 19 anymore, I would have to change the references in each piped text instance, which is not practical because there are a few hundred. It also seems impossible to construct piped text client-side (e.g. "${q://1_" + someVar + "/SelectedChoicesRecode}").
Of course I can go back to asking team members to simply copy from an existing survey (and have a safe backup copy just in case) - but I was wondering if there is way to use Survey from Library without changing the QIDs, or another workaround. Thanks!