I agree with you that printers are still terrible and a pain to work with from the user's perspective. However, I don't think it's true that there has been no innovation. It's just that it has been mostly on the side of reducing per-unit manufacturing costs. I recently took apart a modern HP inkjet and was surprised to find for instance that stepper motors have been replaced with DC motors and optical encoders.
And on the "let's see how much further we can bloat a printer driver, since 1GB to get letters from your computer to paper is obviously not enough".
I hear MacOSX is about the same as Linux, and since Apple owns CUPS (the printing subsystem in Linux) that would make sense.
Edit: I'd also like to add that the whole "bloated software suite", not just for printers but for everything else, is mainly a Windows problem because Windows has a culture of downloading bloated software suites from the manufacturer, instead of having a "distro" with all the device drivers included by default along with lots of open-source software to use those devices. The idea of downloading some big pie of software (or getting it from an included optical disc) from a hardware maker, just to use your piece of hardware, simply does not exist on Linux. And that's the way it should be: the Windows way is what's given us gigabyte+ software suites for simple tasks like using a printer.
Not following at all why that has anything to do with Windows.
However they have been absolutely terrible at the software side of things. This is a shame as it's as visible as the rest of the package to the consumer.
At least on the Mac/iOS side, most consumer printers support AirPrint and you don't need drivers to support basic operations. I have a perfectly functional (cheap) color laser printer that doesn't work pass Windows 7. But works fine with my iOS devices thanks to AirPrint. It also supports Google's Cloud Print so I guess that's one way I could make it work with Windows 10 if I were so inclined.
Put simply, it upends the retarded mess of printer drivers and replaces it with something that does the job perfectly well 99 percent of the time. All it requires is for the printer to have sufficient MIPS to raster PDF files.
I'm using it to network-share an older Samsung printer that has only USB port.
With PCL/Postscript/PDF support in hardware these days, what software side is there? Last time we bought a printer (an HP LaserJet), we just plugged it into our router and with zero additional configuration were able to print from our Macbooks and iPhones/iPads. It literally couldn't have been easier.
At one point while trying to figure out something else, I figured out that they had implemented the polling for the presence of the (usb) printer by having a Windows service rapidly and repeatedly start and stop a second service. So anytime the printer was unplugged, the logs would be nicely purged by this activity.
I don't remember if it was related to those services, but they also screwed up the permissions for a service, making it impossible to use the normal tools to make changes to the service.
The thinner drivers included in Windows 10 with her new computer seem to be better.