It is a complete time suck

I think you misunderstood what I meant. The "xEdit knowledge" I think all players should have means being able to open 2 mods in xEdit and copying one item from one levelled list to another (which is what this whole post is about). That takes 5 minutes to do at most and learning to do it is about as difficult as learning to use a mod manager.

It also doesn't help that the tools themselves are not designed for ease of use.

Do you think xEdit isn't designed for ease of use? For each mod it shows all the things it modifies/adds sorted by category (NPCs/ingredients/spells ... ) and for each item it shows conflicts/overwrites with other mods.