Looping video clip work-flow optimization

Here's a couple ideas to help make handling looping animations a bit easier to work with.

1. Some easier way of cross-fading between two looping image sequence strips. Overlapping these types of clips sometimes isn't an option. In-line cross-fading like in Premiere is one solution. I'm sure there's another.

2. Adjusting Shift D to behave like in Ableton Live's (Arrangement) timeline editor where a clip automatically copies and pastes to the end of itself every time you use the hotkey. It's a little thing, but a great feature if you want something to loop 20 or 30 times. In Live it's Ctrl D, so maybe that hotkey could have the same behavior in Blender's Video Sequencer?