It is such a pity that EASA is run by a load of crooked people.
The previous system, JAA, was a mishmash of bodged regs where each country did more or less what it wanted anyway, and the same anti American sentiment (as EASA is running) prevailed in most of Europe.
JAA gold plated loads of ICAO requirements, inflated costs to everybody, and played a big hand in crippling private IFR capability. The elimination of the 700hr route was just one small piece of this.
But before JAA, it wasn't a bed of roses either. Speaking to some old-timers, the theory exams were only a bit better than the present JAA "90% garbage" which I gather is about to become "95% garbage" under the new EASA question bank.
To be charitable, one can see the EASA motivation in trying to standardise things across the EU, to curb the excesses of JAA, but they lost control of the process very early on (years ago).
This comes as no suprise since the biggest gold platers were the national CAA gravy train riders who left their jobs and went to work in Cologne
I've had some correspondence (on component certification matters) with some Brits there whose replies were sickeningly arrogant - as well as unhelpful. They may have been ex UK CAA, or ex CAA approved design company people. They all come out of the same mould (ISO9000 quality manager types).
EASA was doomed as soon as it got going, as a result of an excessive political mandate, and as a result of stupid recruitment of just the personnel who were going to cripple its objectives.
It would have been fairly easy for EASA to do the obviously desirable things. For example they did one (just one) of them by grandfathering national modification certification to a pan-EU system. They could have accepted FAA STCs. They could have converted FAA papers to EASA ones, as a one-off conversion, which would have caused much of the N-reg scene to dry up. But instead they got infiltrated by a load of America-haters who have been running private anti-American projects from inside the place.