You are never going to get done for flying "VFR" in IMC enroute, and many people do it all over the world.
What you do not want to do is end up at say 5000ft overhead La Rochelle, whose metar is OVC002, and call them up for a VFR approach
So if you are going to do stunts, you need to know what you are doing
Regarding getting IFR approval, I cannot see this ever happening for the vast majority of homebuilts. Lightning protection is one of many things. The CAA would have to be happy with a sub-ICAO category on this (like the U.S. Experimental Category) and I can't see it happening. And even if they did it, it would never be any good abroad, and probably all you could do is
overtly fly approaches in UK Class G.
The real value comes from being able to fly an ILS but ILS kit is not that cheap - a few k is probably the minimum.