But with this new EIR we are not talking about pilots with experience like yours.
Perhaps true, but I don't see a difference between that and somebody going off to an FTO and doing the JAA IR right now (as I am doing, as it happens). You still come out knowing minus zero, zilch, b*gger-all, nothing, nowt about the practicalities of IFR in light aircraft.
You won't even know how to generate a Eurocontrol acceptable route from say EGKK to say LKPR, and maybe that offers a good protection from icing conditions
In fact I would say, only partly tongue in cheek, that the reason why the present training system hangs together and has hung together for decades is because most people who pass through it either rarely if ever use the privileges,
or they don't fly at all (maybe fly a kite) until they get a RHS job in a +6000fpm-capable deiced tank with radar and an old training captain in the LHS.
What is one going to do about that?
EASA doesn't offer a solution. Nobody else does and nobody else ever will because that is how it has always been. The business model is to sell training time and flying time, not to produce pilots who can fly from A to B. If you were to do that you would need to do scenario based training which nobody is doing (in Europe) and it probably would not be ICAO compliant unless you lumped it on the end of the existing sterile stuff.
Fortunately the accident stats suggest that most people are smart enough to fly conservatively, or some unknown % don't fly at all.
Actually I think the uptake of any IR will always be largely limited to aircraft owners, or members of the small number of wholly-IFR syndicates, and these people tend to have the motivation to get clued up. They would get clued up whether they have an EIR or the full IR.
My biggest gripe with the EIR right now is the ban on SIDs and STARs. I think that is simply a c0ckup, done after the whole thing was drafted. The requirement to cancel IFR at the terminating point of the enroute segment, say FL100-FL150 or whatever, is barmy. You could be 50nm from the destination for which you got the tafs and metars, and will have to proceed in VMC, presumably along the STAR route you would have flown anyway (ATC are not likely to want you anywhere else) and then hopefully you will encounter the weather conditions expected.