As I've said elsewhere - I'm looking to do my PPL skills test soon, and so start to plan out what to do with my licence to learn for the next year or so, and I would like an IR(r) to feature in there, as it seems more useful than an EIR in the UK.
One thing to bear in mind is that "instrument flight instruction provided by an IRI(A) or an FI(A) holding the privilege to provide training for the IR" while you're training for the IMC rating, or any PiC time on instruments after you have the IMC rating, can be counted towards the 40 hours instrument time for an IR.
To the best of my knowledge the CAA didn't include a method of lifting the restriction on the IR(R) in its conversion report. I think it missed a trick there.