Copy an Epic with all child work items

Ugh, this is exactly what I came looking for and there's no solution to your post 

We have exactly the same frustration.  Working on implementing a standard way to create work items, so basing everything off copying a template-type Feature with all User Stories and Tasks.  Except the copy work item, including child links, only goes to the next level down.

So far our workaround has been to copy the Feature without child items, then copy the User Stories, with child items, and reparent to the Feature we just copied.  It's clunky and has only led to the line of conversation of "this is easier in Jira"...  Apparently there's an extension to do this, but I didn't find one yet.

Maybe the 'template' functionality can do more?  I haven't done much with it, my thinking is it's only for particular work item layouts and fields etc, not child items.