Here in the UK at the moment the "Focus on Imaging" annual photgraphic show is on, think of it as a smaller PMA. I went yesterday and tried to find out anything I could about this issue.
I spoke to an Epson tech guy on their stand, I've spoken to him before and he's a nice guy, he is personally familiar with this issue and told me it is causing him grief as well as it's stopping him profiling papers easily on his own systems etc. He also said, all conspiracy theories aside, Epson really isn't the kind of company who would ignore something like this. He told me drivers have been recompiled for Snow Leopard and submitted to Apple and been approved, and those are what we're using right now, v6 or something. He said those drivers have two modes, colour management on and colour management off and that both those modes are working, so the error of double profiling is not being introduced during their part of the process, the data arriving at the driver has already been managed by colorsync. This we kinda know already. What is clear is that Epson are not going to build in a workaround directly into their drivers for one version of one piece of software, it just wouldn't be a clever thing to do.
I also spoke to two people on the Adobe stand. The first guy I spoke to was very familiar with the problem and it turned out he doesn't actually work for Adobe but was a freelance colour-management consultant brought in for the show. He was just as frustrated as the rest of us, maybe more so, and admitted he uses CS3 to print out the targets. He couldn't tell me anything about whether/when it will be fixed, but he did say he knew that engineers had been told to set aside one day a week to work on "JFI" issues, that is Just Fix It. He also alluded to the fact that CS5 would be coming out this year...
The second guy on the Adobe stand I spoke to wasn't overly familiar with the problem, but he did work for Adobe. He told me that all work on CS4 has been stopped and everyone is working on CS5 and that the problem won't be addressed in CS4.
This is not good news, and I have to admit I'm personally pretty annoyed about it, I don't consider this to be a bug, but a major flaw. If people are having to resort to installing the previous release of the software just to perform a task they should expect to easily perform, that is not a minor bug, no matter who the fault lies with.
Apple were not present at the show.