Beagle - not so sure; they could release data on # of valid Class 2 medicals, for example. They do know the figures; their people have come out with them on occassions, in conversation.
I did my IMC in about 22 hrs and found it very hard. In retrospect, the ground school was lacking. I recall one occassion when the instructor got me to fly an NDB approach to the home airport but never told me this was what he was doing, so I was just flying headings, etc, only finally realising that we were at the runway... IMHO all instrument training should start with a ground briefing so you know more or less exactly what you will be doing, and only then you go to fly the stuff.
We used to fly 2 PA28s: one had a working ADF but a duff DME (though the DME would ident and display apparently good figures) and the other had a duff ADF but a working VOR, and a duff DME. So different planes were used for different things. The instructor would sometimes hold a £100 handheld GPS, with the airfield set as a WP, and read out the distance to me as a "pretend DME".
With good instruction by a real practicing IFR pilot and a decent plane, the IMCR is a very good qualification to get for getting utility out of flying.
My feeling, speaking to many about this, is that most IMCR holders drop out soon - much as PPL holders seem to. Ultimately, as with any IR, the use of it is limited by access to a decent plane, and the budget to go with that, and both of these things are (generally) lacking in UK GA.
The FAA IR was much harder still; 2 weeks of flying in a Warrior in turbulence, so hard I was knackered and ready to chuck it in every day. By then I had some 50-100hrs in actual IMC from the UK. No resemblance to any real world IFR flight, unless you have a near total instrument panel failure and then go out of your way to make extra work for yourself. In reality one has a backup for just about everything. Still, that's instrument training... if they made it like normal IFR flying it would be a piece of cake. Of course, it would have been harder still without the previous IMCR experience - I would guess 4 weeks would have been appropriate for an ab initio IR.