You can take Breathing Color's Pura Smooth, Pura Velvet or Signa papers and spray it with multiple layers of Timeless (Gloss for every layer except the last - you can kill the gloss by making the last layer matte or satin). Water it down slightly (e.g. 4 parts Timeless to one part de-ionised water) and add a bit of surfactant to make it soak in more easily. This saturates the paper with Timeless and turns it into a fairly tear-resistant, fairly durable sheet.
I suspect this wouldn't work with a baryta or other non-matte paper, though - I doubt the Timeless would soak through it.
I wish there was more imagination applied to substrates, beyond the usual cotton or alpha-cellulose papers and cotton or poly-cotton canvas. Materials science is at a point where we have many more options available - options which are better than the traditional materials for certain purposes.
What about paper made from Tencel fibres? This is a cellulosic fibre, like cotton, but, since the fibres can be cut arbitrarily long, paper made from it can be made from much longer fibres, resulting in a paper with all the properties of cotton, but much more tear- and crease-resistant. Or a Tencel/UHDPE blend, which would be even stronger, much more dimensionally-stable and moisture-resistant, while still being water-permeable and able to absorb ink carrier fluid and water-based coatings, unlike a pure UHDPE paper such as Tyvek.
There's something to be said for a paper that doesn't need framing or coddling like ordinary papers, yet is capable of just as much resolution and doesn't have the texture of canvas. You could flat-mount it to a metal, wood or other substrate, displaying it unframed, while retaining the ability to un-mount and remount it as required, with little risk of damaging the print (not the case with ordinary paper prints). With a change of materials, you could make a paper just like that, with any of the usual paper textures (or none at all, for a super-smooth option). It's important to stick with components which are UV- and vvolatle chemical resistant, for archival longevity. But we have these materials available. What's stopping manufacturers from using them? Economics, I guess.
