I don't know. @administrator didn't cut back on functionality for that reason, as far as I know. My guess is that it's a glitch in the software, perhaps the upcoming v3 of gnusocial brings some improvements.
Tags seem sometimes to collect their counterparts from other instances but most often they don't. (Which has the unintended benefit that they can be used as bookmarks.)
Repeats are never federated, neither from other gnusocial instances nor from mastodon-, pleroma-, friendica- or otherwise run instances.