That does sound an ugly way to do this. But, I don't know if what you describe would be possible. The navigation is in nickel and I can't think of a way to do this.
But, there are several ways extract the annotations. These all create text copies of the annotations. I describe most of them
here. If the purpose is to get the surrounding text as well as the actually annotated test, you probably want to look at
Kobo annotation exporter.