I stand corrected but the truth of the matter is that the trainning should be relevent to flying the aircraft and not a product of a number of european states hobby horses.
Actually they are. The problem is too many people who only want an IR being miss sold the ATPL course which is where all of these myths come from.
The IR exams are not difficult, there is very little in the way of irrelevant materiel in them and efforts continue to remove what is left.
If you actually take the books from the big providers and extract the REQUIRED learning from all of the manuals that they send you it all fits in an A4 binder about the same size as the FAA IR manual from Jeppesen....
There are still accessibility issues around having to take the exams at Gatwick which are being worked on along with on line testing. But as has been pointed out the biggest improvement would be to remove the requirement for FTO based training and allow it to be done at club level.