Top cable routing is a very good idea for a cross bike. I can't tell by this image but in order to run top routing you will need to have a pulley on the seat tube for the cable to rout around and come up to the standard bottom swing road FD. Top swing deraillures that fit road or cross chain rings are hard to come by. I used a mountain top swing FD with some success but since the curvature of the plates are designed to fit a mountain ring you get some clunky shifting.

And yeah disks are not allowed in UCI races in the states but any other race is fine.