Gotta admit, I hadn't ever tried doing what you described in, well, anything for real work. (That is, the work I do in anything.)

There is a bit of clean-up in AD required after doing one of the Boolean operations, but it ends up the same...

Click image for larger version.  Name: capture-001456.png  Views: 141  Size: 10.2 KB  ID: 119038

The clean-up is some stray pieces left over from the intersection operation of the oval I used. Not that clean-up should be required, it shouldn't. The issue revolves around the creation of new curves of the shape(s). It's gotten better and likely will improve more as Serif is aware of the issue.

And I should point out that for certain things XDP does better--and it is my chosen promary vector design application--AD does other things that XDP cannot do and or it does it better. Whether this has utility for what you do I cannot say.

And I will say that Serif has worked out where and what format Xara applications put on the clipboard and one can copy from XDP and paste into AD just fine.

Click image for larger version.  Name: capture-001457.png  Views: 139  Size: 12.2 KB  ID: 119039

Cannot say the same for XDP. AD copied objects paste as a transparent bitmap. Though PDF to AD (or vice versa) works as well. I often use two or more vector editors in conjunction, so that isn't an issue for myself.

Mike