Chosen Solution

I have two iphone 5’s, the first one is a 64GB from a friend japan, works great except that it’s locked to KDDI in Japan, the other is unlocked from Aus but only 16GB and extremely laggy and headphone jack and volume buttons don’t work. I want the unlocked phone with all the well working parts and ports from the other, but will this ultimately be a fruitless task by moving the same unlocked issue over to the other device??

No, but realistically it’s impossible for you to swap the whole nand flash memory chip and CPU. Which is a nightmare / almost impossible to do even for someone that does board level micro soldering repairs daily.