The idea of a universal pack that installs on all images and imports XMLTV + epg.dat sources is a great one...
And an easy one too.
If the image creator just links in the importer bitbake recipe, the importer is automaticaly built and adapted in the image feed, and dependencies get linked in as well, without bothering end users with all kind of patches and manual actions to get it to work properly.
You have to consider that the PLi team had perhaps some reason to deactivate the epg.dat import feature...
Instability was the main reason for not advertising the feature. Also the epg.dat method wastes a considerable amount of RAM because it can't be properly filtered, and it can't function on systems without special patches. Besides those drawbacks, it doesn't really seem a useful feature since a typical import of a 100k events takes about 2 minutes, and hardly has any effect on the box while running.