You are right. It is 7 subjects (I just remembered it wrong).
Yes you can do the 7 subjects anyhow you want it, but it is still 7 subjects.
Airlaw, Instrumentation, Flightplanning, Human performance, Meteorology, Radio navigation and IFR communication.
EASA has written quite specific the amount of questions needed in each subject, amount of time available for each exam, and required score to pass. So I still do not see how this can be tweaked into less than this ???
Adding all subjects into one (or 3) exams is not really less, but just a different way of doing the same
Converting an already obtained ICAO IR is a different matter though