> 0) Don't buy from companies that treat me like a criminal.
So don't buy printers, basically? That's sarcasm, but, non-sarcastically, do you know any printer companies that (make decent printers and) have basic respect for their users?
Brother laser printers are cheap and extremely reliable if you only need to print in black and white. Because they use toner, there's no ink to dry up so they can go months without printing and not clog. The catch is that Brother started putting chips in their toner cartridges a few years ago to keep track of toner usage (they previously used a mechanical gear system). You can still buy and use third-party toner but most third-party toner cartridges use small batteries on their chips and the toner will stop working if the battery runs out (this is the source of all the rumors about various firmware updates stopping third-party toner from working). However, even if you stick to official toner, the cost per page is still fairly low.
If you need to print in color, you can buy an inkjet printer that uses ink tanks instead of cartridges. However, you generally should be printing at least once per week as otherwise you'll need to waste a bunch of ink on head cleaning cycles. The other thing is that all inkjet printers (including ink tanks) clean their heads by spraying ink into a pad called the "waste ink reservoir". After a couple years of use, the pad will become saturated with ink and the printer will refuse to work. Most printers have the pad integrated into the printer, so you have to throw out the printer at this point. Look for a printer with a "maintenance box", which is really the waste ink pad in a user-replaceable plastic cartridge.
I'm still going with Brother. There was a recent claim that they disabled 3rd party toners but there were lots of anecdotal stories of people who had no such trouble with it.
If Brother ever truly loses the plot, my next printer will be the local FedEx store. Life's too short to fight hostile hardware.
I have a Brother multifunction colour inkjet (MFC-J995DW). I generally only printed in B&W on the very rare occasion I printed, so when a colour ran out (usually because one of my children errantly printed some giant colour thing) it was perfectly happy to keep printing black content using the giant, very full black cartridge.
A recent (as in the past two years) update removed that benefit. Now it fully refuses to function in any capacity if a colour cartridge is out. It won't let me print fully-black content, and it won't even let me scan.
HP LaserJet from the period where they still made atomic clocks. Did need to upgrade the memory and added a network card when my computer no longer had a parallel port.
1) Manufacture's suggested update schedule.