To the point of slopes, I think THX had the best idea when they attempted to use the speakers + active crossovers to achieve Linkwitz-Riley 4th order filters. The idea is that the sealed satellite speaker, crossed at 80 Hz would naturally produce a 2nd order Butterworth filter. Add another such filter, at the same point with the same slope and you get a combined LR-4th order.
This is cool because now you can mate it directly with a subwoofer with a 4th order LR filter too and have perfect matching.
Of course, many reasons why we can't do that today, and we rely on DSP in the subwoofer chain to deal with any discrepancies.