Cross country is no less interesting than curling or luge or any of the dozens of olympic sports that no one cares about longer than a few weeks every 4 years. Dumb to say that one medal is worth less than another.
I though I was being clear that the sentiment was motivated by homerism, but even then I never said any medal is worth less.
My comment was more about medal distribution among the sports. You have large numbers of medals for competitions that don't seem all that different from one another. For example, the Dutch get all their winter medals from speed skating. Norway is slightly more diversified, but still gets most of their medals from disciplines where you ski distances (cross country, biathlon, nordic combined). Contrast that with a countries like Germany or Canada, which seem much more diversified, possibly suffering in their totals because of that. Even the US at the moment is basically all snowboard medals this year.
It can be even worse in the summer olympics, with swimming and track and field offering a zillion medals, and individual athletes being able to compete for so many medals in one year.
The only sport that has mainstream interest is hockey and the NHL isn't sending any players. But that's the olympics.
If you define mainstream interest as not interested the rest of the year, then yes - hockey will be the only winter sport anyone cares about. But snowboarding definitely generates the most buzz, with figure skating probably even more popular worldwide.