I dislike imperator's mechanics,feel like a mobile game.
That said is there any decent imperator or ck3 mods ? Anything like warhammer mod for ck2 ?
When was the last time you tried IR? I think the pops system is in a far better place than it was at launch.
As far as mods go, the aforementioned bronze age mod was the best thing for it. CK3 marketers recruited the dev away from working on IR, but someone has finally forked the IR version and is trying to work on it. Honestly, I'm not sure I'm optimistic about it... at the very least their english abilities are lacking enough to be super distracting for me, but perhaps that'll sort itself out if it takes off again.
There's a LotR mod for CK3 that might be interesting, but I haven't tried it.