No, made no progress on this per se. What I wound up doing was importing the Paradox data into an old copy of MS Access 2003. From there, I was indeed able to import it into SQL Server with only minor issues.

Access (and SQL Server, IIRC) is a little bit fussier than Paradox regarding date values. So I encountered some user-entered dates in Paradox data that caused some problems. (As I recall, they were out of range for smallDateTime...something like that) but this wasn't too hard to deal with.

Yes, it is a real PITA that you cannot (or at least I couldn't) import the Paradox data directly and had to resort to this intermediate step...but it least it got the job done, inelegant though it may be 😉