TPD was never intended solely to regulate the market, although that was a convenient vehicle
It's not so much bureaucratiic inertia - more targeted legislation
We are up against two lobbying giants in Tobacco and Pharma
Vaping is a severe threat to their whole existance - in the UK alone, they must have noticed a significant reduction in profits in the last few years - as will the exchequer
Between them they managed to find a way to kill off vaping to be replaced by their own highly regulated product.
The fact this was done through the back door via European legislation is telling and Brexit won't make any difference
We fight the same thing here in the States, we have big tobacco (whom I've always thought was just sitting on their hands while the smaller businesses built the market, basically a wait and see whether they let the new distraction of vaping die off by attrition or take it over via regulation if it blossoms and use the market the other small guys have built) and then our legislatures both at the state and federal level, that reap massive tax revenue from cigarette sales (which vaping has radically reduced).
So on one side we have a massive giant with incredible levels of capital that's been reaped by selling products that we all agree are bad for you, and on the other side we have the power of the state (at all levels) which takes a big chunk of their tax revenue from the sales of that bad product. It's interesting, because while you have public service anouncements out here runing right no, saying how bad vaping is, there is no one- NO ONE proposing an outright ban on either of these bad(cigarettes) or supposeduly bad (vaping) products.
To me, if both products were actually tuly harmful on a massive scale (which I don't think they are anything on the level of other outright banned items such as opiates, etc.) one would expect the state to simply ban them. But they don't, which to me means that they like having them around for the tax revenues they can reap from the sales.
It's really between the devil and the deep blue sea here in the US, and the only real hope over here (as I see it) is that vaping is accepted by the mainstream in a big way (which some stars like DiCapprio have helped out a lot with) so that you're average, fairly conservative soccer mom from the midwest doesn't see vaping as the worst thing her now 18 or 21 year old kid could do, or really even anything that bad at all. I have some glimmers of hope for this, but it's really uncertain.
Without that level of mainstreaming and the support that brings, they'll either kill it softly through regulation leaving only to actual tobacco companies (who can afford the compliance departments and inevitable fines when they mess up) or tax it so it's as close as possible to the cost of cigarettes to protect their (the bureaucrats) revenue stream.
It's just crazy to watch the wheels of the bureaucracy protect their vested interests and do their best to drive people away from something that is minimally a much safer and clearly widely acceptable alternative to smoking in the market.