I used to work in IT at a public school district 15 years ago where they had hundreds of Epson printers with fixed printheads. This saved costs in the cartridges but the inks(which were designed to produce excellent photographic results) had some substance that caused them to clog up these very microscopic printheads essentially rendering the printheads and thus the printer destroyed. This happened a lot on printers where people would only print once in a blue moon.
Seems like you can have two options: poor quality but thin water based inks. I'd argue Laser had taken that market away from inkjet for good. The other option is hight quality photographic ink that is much thicker and gels up easier. Not to mention the printheads are more delicate due to their finer pitch.
Even within different lines from the same manufacturers I remember that varied because of the design of the cartridge.
And similarly commercial printers would be more aggressive about automatically ensuring the cartridge ran every once in a while than home ones. All things they could (and probably did) tweak when moving to this model
It's fine to want something better. I, personally, gave up on inkjet printers and switched to laser a long time ago. I have only ever been an occasional printer but I always want a printer available for when I need it. I have no interest in photo printing either, so a laser is perfect for my needs. Perhaps you have different needs. I can imagine it being very frustrating if you want to print the occasional photo and are always finding the ink cartridge empty or dried up. Personally, if I wanted to occasionally print a photo I would probably get it done professionally rather than waste money on yet another inkjet printer.
