Attempted to carry out instruction #3 in SMK's blog post "Global changes to speed up editing", but I can't find a single example of a situation which matches the case. After getting no results on sample files with XSLT, I ran the following XQuery on the whole db to try to find some cases to work with:

xquery version "1.0";

declare default element namespace "http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0";
declare namespace util="http://exist-db.org/xquery/util";
declare namespace hcmc="http://hcmc.uvic.ca/ns";

declare function hcmc:cleanUpNode($inNode as node()) as xs:string{
	translate(normalize-space($inNode), '*', '')
};

for $d in //def[following-sibling::cit][count(seg) = 1]
let $seg := $d/seg
where $d/following-sibling::cit/quote/phr[hcmc:cleanUpNode(.) = hcmc:cleanUpNode($seg)]
return $d/ancestor::entry

along with some variants of it, I couldn't find a single hit, so I've given up on this one.