Well described, and good advice as well. Inkjet printers are an anomaly in tech progress (or lack thereof), as you describe. Decades ago I had an IT job in academia that included sourcing, installing, and maintaining printers (classrooms, department and faculty offices, media lab, etc.). Lasers were large, pricey, and pretty bombproof. Inkjets were fairly new then, and not nearly as cheap as now (the "selling ink not printers" business model was not fully rolled out yet). On the one hand, there have been major improvements in the quality of output inkjets can produce at a given price point. On the other hand, as you write - quality of the hardware has probably declined overall, since the point is to sell expensive ink and the hardware only has to be adequate for that purpose.

I also worked for some years in tech QA/testing and occasionally did inkjet printer testing. It was an outsource testing situation and the manufacturer provided the parameters for pass or fail. Mostly it was about alignment - did the printer put the right stuff in the right place on each media type/size, per manufacturer specs for that model. We were literally printing sample documents and measuring output layout against spec. We were not asked to test hardware durability, economy of ink use, wireless connectivity, or other common weak points of inkjet printers.