Brian,
I am disturbed to learn that an "empty" cartridge contains 40ml of ink. I was always under the impression (perhaps erroneous) that when they sell you a 220ml cartridge they mean that you will get 220ml of usefulness out of it regardless of how much they purposely leave in the cartridge when their firmware tells you it is "empty". They do leave some ink behind for technical reasons that they have explained. But if in fact we only get say 180 ml of printing from it, I need to increase the price per ml in my costing model accordingly. I shall contact Epson America and ask this question - it will be interesting to see whether I get an answer, and if so, what.
Dark Penguin and Brian,
What you think is clogging may not actually be clogging. It is more likely absence of ink from the lines because of air bubbles or the ink dropping back from the print head; then you engage cleaning cycles to force ink through the lines to the head. The impact of course is the same: wasted ink - and lots of it. There is no doubt in my mind that Epson is very well aware of this problem even though they say little or nothing about it. There is also precious little information about the causes. The problem is we won't really know whether they have licked it until people buy the new model and use it for quite a few months. It will be another experiment.
Unless Epson has changed its ways, I'm not holding my breath about availability. They do have a track record of creating hype, then announcing an announcement date, then making the announcement about the availability date some time down the road, then sometime after the announced date providing a very small number of machines relative to the pent-up demand they have created, frustrating large numbers of customers, then finally gearing-up enough manufacturing to meet demand promptly - all of this cycle consuming many months of teeth-gnashing and finger-pounding on computer keyboards. Let us all relax, sit back and enjoy the ride.