I feel like a big hurdle is the way you have to type out cross posts.

What typing are you referring to? I just click the cross-post button, which seems to do most of the work of filling in the title and URL fields, quoting the body text, etc.

I do wish that cross-posts were more embedded though, like Reddit cross-posts. It currently seems that if the original post is edited, these changes to not propagate to any cross-posts.