This stuff is pure politics.
ICAO gives us amazing overflight and landing privileges, so long as you stay noncommercial.
But ICAO has a price: everybody not ICAO certified is crippled. That’s the quid pro quo.
Even within one country there are issues e.g. in the UK you can IFR approve a homebuilt (via, I am told, a very slow process run by basically one guy who has a full time job) but it still needs certified avionics. It does in the US also. And the uncertified avionics makers seem to have problems delivering some key functionality – here, perhaps because Jeppesen won’t sell them the databases.
The wider issue is how many pilots go for the IR. That number has barely improved over the last 20 years, as we have moved from the JAA IR (which briefly, when I started looking, needed all 14 JAA ATPL exams!) via the EASA IR, then CBIR… So much hope was invested, so many GB of forum bandwidth used, and in the end almost nothing has improved. Just increments. Still have to go via an FTO, still tied to most FTOs not wanting to train private pilots, or train in customer aircraft, etc.
Peter wrote:
This stuff is pure politics.
Disagree! It’s as much if not more emotions than politics.
If as many people wanted to fly from Germany to France for a round of golf on Saturday afternoons as from VIrgina to myrtle beach or as many construction companies from Belgium would have construction sites in Poland or Norway as Oklahoma companies have in Nebraska or Colorado we would see much more midrange GA travel and thus much more demand for IR.
But for mainly emotional reasons Europeans like to stay in their country – and language is one of them.
Well, that’s a whole other topic 
The willingness to fly across Europe correlates heavily with how comfortable a given country is in the use of English. You can call it “emotional”, I suppose.
I decided to get my IR after a really nice examiner decided that instead of calling off my MEP revalidation we would see if there was an area not too far away in VMC and file there and back IFR. This introduction to IFR flying got me hooked. I got to fly over Versailles and Orly which I caught glimpses of through the cloud and then final where the cloud was such that we needed to descend to minimums, where we popped out of the cloud to see approach and runway lights ahead.
I was hooked. Nothing to do with a round of golf or business trips and but I do fly to other countries. I fly twins and IFR because I enjoy it and I take every opportunity to encourage all pilots to give it a try. But I realise from this forum and from pilots at many of the clubs I visit in my region most do not want the expense of flying twins and in that area I’m flogging a dead horse. But many are interested in the IR especially since the introduction of the CBIR and the BIR to come.
From the defence put up by UK pilots,when they thought it was threatened, the IMC rating is still very popular with leisure pilots. However in my area many pilots like to fly older Robin’s, Cubs, various Jodels, Gardan as well as more modern kit builds and ULM eg Dyn Aero’s MCr4, the Pioneer 300 etc. At least 4 I know have given up the IR preferring to fly ULM (mainly because they are getting older, but then again the PPL demographic in this area is getting older.)
They are not interested in buying or renting a glass panel Cirrus, or PA46. They like their old machines or their ULM.
So @ Malibuflyer maybe I am being idealistic but
bursting out of a stratus ridden sky at minimums to see the runways lights where you expect them to be is for me one of the most enjoyable things to do and I would love to see more pilots being able to do it.
I too would never go back to VFR-only, but maybe a part of this puzzle is that one can do it all illegally and nobody can tell?
With a modern UL (OK; we know the sales of the ~€200k ones are actually very low) with nice avionics you can do all this and you don’t need an IR.
The only thing for which you need an IR is doing it “officially” i.e. visibly.
It may be slightly more common in club environments that aircraft fall behind on avionics. But that isn’t the main cause for the lack of IR pilots. (It may actually be a consequence of a lack of IR pilots)
I believe the gap is caused by the level of commitment and cost required to achieve the IR.
It’s not huge but is significant.
I’m on this path and it is and will consume all of my spare time between now and Xmas.
I can’t take lots of time off, I can’t be flexible around wx so that will be an issue. Aircraft faults will trip up dates. I’m not expecting it to be cheap.
All that on a backdrop of owning my own, and living 10 mins from the field.
Try having a regular job, family, renting and living an hour away.
Cheap avionics are, and will continue to be fantastic for the future improvement of older or cheaper airframes, but that isn’t the biggest barrier to IR pilot numbers.
Peter wrote:
I too would never go back to VFR-only, but maybe a part of this puzzle is that one can do it all illegally and nobody can tell?
Do you mean filing and flying IFR without an IR, or flying VFR in IMC?
Surely there can’t be too many doing the former….is there any mechanism to ‘catch’ such people?
I mean VFR in IMC.
Filing IFR at altitude and flying internationally is somewhat hazardous 
Well, no worse than doing it in a homebuilt, especially across countries which don’t allow it, I guess, and enough of that does go on. I am not aware of anybody having been done for it.
Peter wrote:
I mean VFR in IMC.
You mean uncontrolled IFR in IMC? VFR in IMC is only possible as special VFR.
No, I mean flying in cloud on a “VFR” flight. Almost everybody does that.
Many years ago, on another forum on which I used to waste my life, a well known French lady ATCO (nickname frog_atco, no less!) launched into a tirade about Brits doing this in France, later moving into a caricature of a Brit running out of oxygen etc etc. In truth, however, I think almost everybody who has the opportunity has done this, simply because a lot of European airspace, together with ATC not allowing VFR traffic into much of it, forces people to pretend they are VFR when they are in cloud.
