You're asking good questions.
The government has tried diligently for a decade or more to reduce complexity and lack of predictability in the SR and ED program, and as other people have alluded to here, that continues to be the swan song. It is very difficult to do that. None of the measures the government is proposing to introduce would actually do anything other than make it more complex and more expensive for taxpayers. It would force some taxpayers to not want to even apply under the program, because the more complex anything is, the less likely they are to do it.