Currently, I can achieve this effect by spamming keyframes into the transition, but I was wondering, is there a better/faster/more automated way of doing this within Kdenlive?

Yes, using the motion tracking feature. If I remember correctly, right click on a clip in the project view and analyse it, should be next to deshake or so. Afterwards you can then import the key frames from the clip into the zoom and pan effect, if I remember somehow correctly. There is an old blog post on Kdenlive.org about it that gives some help.

http://userbase.kde.org/Kdenlive/Manual ... /Auto_Mask

The jbm's blog to this motion tracking is this : http://kdenlive.org/users/j-b-m/prepari ... ve-release
The link to the movie with an example is brokken I think, but it's this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R2igZXKl-U