The UK CAA has about 20k GA pilots and about 20k GA planes on its books, plus a few k foreign reg ones. Further into Europe, the activity is generally much lower and by the time you are in Greece it is about 1% of the UK figures. In fact if looking at IFR GA, the figures in much of Europe are very very low.
So it's no wonder that if you assemble a committee of people at European level to look at an "appropriate syllabus" for an IR, most of them are going to be airline types which have no clue about what a GA IFR pilot actually needs to know. If these people ver flew "GA" it was many years ago. If any of them fly GA today it is most likely purely VFR; few airline types fly GA IFR too.
I would like to be optimistic but this has been tried so many times in the past, yet everybody has failed totally, and the IR has got harder at every stage at which it has been reviewed. I guess this is because those trying to improve things have always been approaching it with rational arguments, but actually the key lies wholly in politics, prejudice and symbolism. And now we have symbolism on the European scale... the EU is nothing without its symbolism and this needs to be understood to make progress.
It may well improve in the next few years, or perhaps sooner, but we have had so many false horizons and IMHO anybody who actually wants to fly IFR (and can get an N-reg) would be a fool to wait for a new EASA IR to be significantly easier on the theory side. Obviously if you can't get an N-reg and need IFR then you may as well do what is on the table right now.
And if the pilot can get an N-reg, waiting for a new EASA IR is doubly pointless because if you have an FAA IR you can then exercise the conversion route which is pretty efficient.