I don't have a dog in this fight, having no religious preference for any printer brand. As pointed out multiple times before it comes down to comparative strengths of different ink technologies. Epson's print heads are more durable and allow using a wider variety of inks. Some papers simply won't work with Canon inks. On the flip side, the disposable print head and nozzle remapping help alleviate clogging. We could go on about minimum ink droplet size, dot pitch, dithering technologies, etc. No matter. Epson, Canon, and HP machines all are capable of printing better than most photographers can shoot.
Suffice it to say that Epson printers are not for folks who do not print frequently.
Our largest client for printer profiles maintains a fleet of approximately 500 Epson printers (x890 models for the past few years, x880 prior). We measure the output at intervals around six months for each printer. With this sample size we have uncovered wearout , preventative maintenance, and setup issues that have been bumped back upstream to Fuji (provider of the print drivers and front-line support) and to Epson.
Nevertheless nozzle clogging remains a persistent problem. Looking at our data, my suspicion is that the incidence of clogging roughly correlates to the print volume. We do not have customer usage data from our client, but as all the printer profiles are hosted on our web site, we can tell how many thousands of times a particular profile is downloaded each year. Labs with the most downloads overall have the fewest problems with nozzle clogs.
Our customer also has over 100 Fuji and Noritsu Dry Lab printers. These are $30K small format, rebranded Epson printers with driver software and job management software written by companies with far more experience than Epson. These machines bang out thousands of prints, seven days a week with breaks only for a few holidays a year. I looked through our problematic print database and saw absolutely no entries for nozzle clogging on any of the hundreds of times we have profiled these printers.