Unfortunately, the crap one has to learn for the PPL prepares one very poorly for flying abroad.
To fly abroad, one needs to pick up a whole raft of operational trivia which is not taught anywhere.
The best way to do a useful PPL is to "rent" an instructor for an extended holiday flying around Europe. The resulting course would deliver an excellent all around pilot who would have had a great experience but would cost perhaps twice the UK average of £8k - plus some means of feeding and bedding (for want of a better word) the instructor on the trip.
This is sometimes done in the USA, where an instructor and an examiner can be freelancers. Unfortunately, in the UK, the need to work through an FTO makes this harder, and anyway few UK instructors know about foreign flying.
The above is even more true for the IR. Nothing beats some flying around Europe, picking up loads of operational stuff which is not taught in any IR.
I've done both JAA and FAA standalone PPLs and their respective written exams so can relate both to real world flying, and neither is better than the other. The FAA written is a lot less revision than the JAA stuff. I don't think ICAO syllabus requirements are the problem.