I wonder how much these problems are problems of information. The reason printers are crap is that most people buy them based on 1) price, and 2) listed features. As a result, manufacturers optimize for these. If people understood that most of the listed features would never work, the paper would constantly jam, the drivers would never be updated, toner/ink would be expensive, installing the printer would require adding lots of stupid software to windows, they would probably pick a more expensive printer with less features that actually works.