Well, there you go: there's one design problem with printers right there!

If a printer is a node on the network, an admin should be able to ping it, just to see if it's responsive and seeing the rest of the network!

At any rate, these problems you mention are solvable:

Manufacturer should write self-updating software, so the printer can load the correct driver from the manufacturers website automatically. It's not hard to do!

And it should easily recover in the case of a failed driver loading attempt (by keeping the initial firmware in a backup memory).

Also in your view of "retarded users" users shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get their printers to work.

They should plug it in, and select "print" in their document, and voila!