I think the difficultly is that you are essentially hacking the pages and while it can work and other people do mini-hacks via placeholders and the like, it's not really a natural use of Xara. Anyone who is manipulating pages like this might ask if life would be even easier not using Xara.

It's really an identification of a bit of a dilemma for Xara, people wanting to extend Xara functionality, but that in itself goes against what I've also thought to be the basic premise of Xara - design without needing to care about the underlying code.