Marck and Dan,
I'd gladly buy a 44" printer if I knew I'd be protected against clogs. But no matter which size I choose, I'll be up that hill at one point or another. As Mark says, I am not a pro photographer and don't sell prints for a living. I have a few customers I make prints for once in a blue moon. Otherwise, I use my printer for color management testing mostly. It breaks my heart that a P800 is limited in terms of the number of RIPs that support it. The 4900 was fully supported by GMG, EFI, Onyx, ORIS and a host of others, which allowed me to "learn" these products at my own pace, experiment, and then competently intervene at commercial printers. That is one of the reasons that would make me lean, you see, toward a P5000 -- or maybe a P6000, so that I can continue enjoying specialized CMYK to CMYK transforms for proofing. But since buying an inkjet printer is akin to buying a time bomb, since it's only a matter of time until it becomes unusable, because of unavoidable ink clogs (I've had a 3000, a 4000 and now a 4900), a little voice in me tells me I should put the least amount of money on the machine since I'll end up losing it anyway, with time.
I thought about, perhaps, buying an A3 color laser printer? Same kind of money, horrendous cost of consumables but NO MORE INK CLOG -- ever. For that reason alone, I'd go for it. But the present quality of CMYK toners never approaches the gamut of inkjet printers which in my mind rules out this class of machines completely. I don't mind reprofiling every time I need to use the machine but I'd have to give up on saturation and image quality overall, although laser printing has considerably improved over the year.
I spent time yesterday reading about people's experience with the P800 and it is not clear cut that this machine is a huge improvement over previous generations of ink formulations. Some people claim "clog-free" operations, even over the course of weeks, months while others complain they routinely need to waste ink to unclog it. One way or another, owning an inkjet printer is a costly proposition, there is the initial expenditure of buying the printer but there is also the ongoing "hidden costs" of wasting ink and the purchase of maintenance tanks to keep the printer "operating normally" over and above the regular cost of consumables.
In the end, I agree with you that these machines are made to "print", daily, with medium to moderate to high volume. I've seen one 9900 unit where I used to work at Transcontinental run for months, outputting loads of proofs, seven days a week, sometimes changing rolls two to three times a day, only to have the head fail progressively, to the point that, after a year and a half, a new printer had to be put in, paying $2,000 for replacing the print head didn't make sense.
The only thing I'd consider is to buy my next Epson printer from Europe, to avoid all the stupid chip protection.