Well I'm glad to report this worked! I had a few problems deleting the existing pools. View kept saying deleting but nothing happened. In the end I had to use ADSIedit on the connection server to manually delete all the old VM and pool records
After installing composer on the 5.5 VC, I was able to create a connection in View admin and then begin re-creating the pools.
We were able to successfully reattach each persistent disk to their intended owners. Did some spot checks and the users desktops , bookmarks etc all worked
It was a time consuming process but it does work. Hopefully VMware can create an article for this. Lord knows I searched for days, i had to read a lot of things just to formulate this plan.