That's an interesting point. I can entertain the thought that for a player, missions bring short time goals and restrict what you ought to do in a sea of possibilities. It makes you use the mechanics as if your ruler had some kind of overall objective.
However, do missions have to be... historical?
I am an anti missions because they are "railroading". What I don't like is that they seem to present single(s) path(s) to countries. No matter how much definite missions thhe devs add, there will never be enough to represent the wealth of situation a ruler of this era could see himself into. At the same time, forcing countries to go in "historical" paths, and sometimes even ahistorical chosen patths detracts from how the game is currently playing. Goals are fine, but, as someone told, if as England you united with France and decided to conquer Europe, maybe you should have less missions about colonies.
The solution, it seems to me, has been in our face forever, and has been neglected since the introduction of the current mission system. They are called "generic missions". People don't like them because there are so few of them and so little variety. However, if you add randomly generated missions to the mix and make the every mission into a random one, and when the hat fits a generated mission would have the localization of the current missions, that would make two things : first, you could have far more missions per country than currently (and every path would be open), to the point that outside world conquest scenarios, a country would never run out of missions; second, it would shut down criticism from people like me since what would matter would be the strategic opportunity (that might sometimes resemble history) instead of a forced outcome.
How could such a thing be achieved? Well, probably not in EUIV, since the shadow of EUV frows larger every day, but as I explained a bit earlier, to me every conquest mission could easily be made into cultural, religion and proximity ones where X region is targeted because of those reasons. Permanent claims should only be a thing for cultural groups (if they have any purppose at all). I don't have a very good knowledge of other types of missions because I rarely focus on them, but increasing devs and constructing particular buildings in your capital also sound like easily generalizable.
But, will you say, we'll lose that sense of direction if every country can have missions for whatever he wants. That's where OP suggestion comes in handy. If you can, like in Imperator, choose a specific mission "focus", maybe with reminders that a focus or another has "historical", "content fueled" missions, then you would still have a humanly comprehensible tree to attack. You would complete a few branches (maybe up to three at the same time) and then choose new ones among a choice, so that you don't run out of things to do, but aren't either constricted into betraying your allies.
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