The reason why so many people think this mod is "dead," is more or less because it is. The initial full release of Iron Europe brought terrible lag, crashes, performance for a majority of the players, including myself. People just got sick of it and bored, and left, again including myself. I haven't had a chance to download this recent patch, but some of my Steam friends say it's good, most say it did hardly anything but fixing minor lag and bugs/textures, etc.
Iron Europe I think was a hit or miss from the start, especially with all the cool and unique features it has. There's only so much the Warband engine can run at once, and twenty grenades going off every five seconds sure as hell doesn't help. Same goes for all the machine guns being fired, mortar shells being dropped, sapper builds going on, huge maps with loads of unnecessary extras/details, all cause lag.
We'll see how it goes. Events pretty much are no more, because of the lag issue, but I'm sure they'll start popping up again soon. People just need to get back to the mod and give it another chance, I will myself soon.