Because not enough people with the skills or resources to do it care enough to do it. It's not really all that strange when you think about it; when printers st

Because not enough people with the skills or resources to do it care enough to do it. It's not really all that strange when you think about it; when printers started to become extra annoying people stayed on the well known ones and when they got to the MFP or current models and types stage, the people that could do it started to care less and less about printing. The problem isn't in the mechanics of the printing; controlling a carriage along one axis, and a couple of rollers is essentially a 'simpler' version of a 3d printer. Interpreting a representation of the desired output into signals to drive the mechanics is also already a done deal (think in terms of G-code for example). The real problem is in the existing controller (usually a really niche, old and crappy setup) and the rather low quality of most of the components (remember: this is mass produced stuff, intended to make money on volume, not quality). So you have to keep track of what offsets and adjustments you need to add in order to keep the output of the device somewhat reasonable. And then you need to make sure that the host system knows what to send to the device, which might be 'dumb' data like a bitmap raster, or something faster and higher quality (because the printer can adjust what it does based on what it knows the output needs to be -- this is nearly impossible to do for pre-rendered jobs), at which point you get into PS and PCL which is about as problematic has HTML 4 was, but instead of fixing it for 1 browser, you'd be fixing it again and again for every print job... In the commercial mass produced stuff, a lot of resources are put in validation and correction algorithms, this is probably as close to a definition of 'secret sauce' you can get, and also really a big problem caused by the need for a manufacturable design that is profitable. Technically, this could be done slightly easier if the controller and tolerances were better; but at that point you'd have to replace a lot of parts to the point where you're almost building a new printer. Or you have to replicate that special sauce somehow.