I’d love to ask Chris Remo if he does any UK crosswords now he’s living here. I do the Guardian quick crossword each day and I find it much harder than the NYT because UK crosswords have far fewer spaces that intersect.
An average UK grid looks like this:
Whereas a USA grid looks like this:
I get much more stuck on British crosswords because sometimes even with all the letters from other answers I just don’t know it. Particularly if it’s trivia I just don’t know rather than wordplay.