Marco - I also think there's a bug. While printing, Illustrator seems to ignore the rendering intent selected in Print>Color Management dialog box, and it's using the rendering intent selected in Color Settings (with Advanced Mode enabled). The workaround is to set Absolute Colorimetric intent in Color Settings.
Another issue is, that the document is transparent, so if you want to have simulation of paper white, you need to put a rectangle filled with white in the background.
I just tried that, and there
is a difference in the output, just as you suggest, crazy as that sounds otherwise.
Still, the printed colors look off, compared to what I get by printing with Photoshop – in the Illustrator print, the reds and purples are too dark, the yellows, greens and oranges more saturated.
Also, the substrate simulation is now there in the Illustrator print, amazingly so — but I had to activate the AbsCol intent
in the application's Color Settings!. Still, the color of the paper simulation is wrong — in my case, too yellow-reddish, instead of the slightly bluish tinge it should have (which should match an *a value of 0 and a *b value of -1.98, to be exact [the aimpoints of GRACoL Coated v1], whereas it is *a +1.04 [too red] and *b 0 [not blue enough] in the Illustrator print).
Plotting spectral readings of the print made from Photoshop against the expected values in my destination profiles, I achieve a reasonably close match, overall (in DeltaE 2000, a max of 2.75, a min of 0.82, an average of 1.47; 60% of the values are below 1.5 DeltaE). The paper simulation measures *a -1.28 [too green] and *b -4.10 [too blue]: that is overall too blue, which probably indicates a linearity problem in the highlights in my custom profile; still the error is in the correct hue direction — blue, instead of red.
A similar plot of the spectral readings of the print made from Illustrator produces the following DeltaE 2000 values: a max of 5.89, a min of 0.94, and an average of 2.61; 43% of the values are below 1.5 DeltaE; 28% are higher than 4.5 DeltaE.
So, even when I set the RI in Illustrator's Color Settings to AbsCol, Photoshop still creates a markedly better match to my intended target.
Given all that, I would conclude that the suggested workaround, unfortunately, is not remedying the problem, though we now know that one changes the printed results in Illustrator by changing...the application's Color Settings! That is clearly a software bug, or a result of bad programming, which, in practical terms, probably amounts to the same thing.