The UK tried avoiding this with the plug fuses without too much success. The US allow for 15amp outlets on 20amp circuits, posing a serious risk of overloading plug strips.
I wouldn't agree with you that the UK BS1363 system has had limited success. It's very successful.
While I'm not a major fan of rings, they are installed in millions of British homes and have proven to be flexible and safe.
In Ireland, we typically use 20amp radials with 13Amp socket outlets and fused plugs.
There are no non-fused plugs that are compatible with BS1363 socket outlets. It's as simple as that. While, it is possible to stick a CEE 7/16 plug into the outlet, it requires overriding the shutters with a tool which is a bit of a pain in the rear-end, and next to impossible on some of the more sophisitcated sockets e.g. MK brand. Larger European plugs simply do not fit the slots as the pins are slightly too wide.
With the BS1363 fusing system, at the very least the appliance and outlet will be protected at 13A, and because the majority of appliances are now shipped with molded-on plugs, they have the correct rating fuses installed. So, things like TVs, Set top boxes, lamps etc are normally protected with a 3amp or 5amp fuse, depending on rating.
There's absolutely no way you can overload a UK/Ireland power strip as the fuse in the plug will blow. The only way you could have a problem is if you used a non-fused power strip while on vacation on the continent with a CEE 7/7 plug on the other end.
The other major difference in the UK and Ireland is that we deliberately moved to a system which was designed to force standardisation by making all other systems obsolete and not allowing backwards compatibility. This was not the case in continental Europe or North America where backwards compatibility with old plugs and outlets was maintained.
If you do come across an old BS546 outlet, or schuko in Ireland (very very rare now) you simply cannot fit a modern plug into it, nor can you fit an old plug into a modern socket outlet.
The net result of this was that in the UK and Ireland you will only find one totally standardised type of socket and one totally standardised type of plug. There are no variations. They're all grounded, all shuttered and since the late 80s, all have sheathed pins.
The major downside of the system is that the plugs are quite bulky, requiring a plug roughly the size of a CEE 7/7 even on the smallest appliance.
I'd suspect that it's HIGHLY unlikely that we'll ever re-standardise simply because we've been through all of this before and it was a mess of adaptors for decades.
It's highly unlikely that since we finally got shut of the old round-pin plugs and sockets that we want to go through yet another re-standardisation
Also, anything that was proposed would have to provide significant safety advantages over BS1363. CEE 7/7 doesn't do that.
