Epson R1900 and iCC/iCM profiling...when do you give up?

Question

I'm using Windows 7 64bit (non-SP1) and Lightroom 3.3 with a Epson R1900 printer.
Sorry if this is winded, but I've tried a lot myself and had to break down and post here.
I've read a lot of posts already about disabling color management in the printer or in LR 3.3. I've downloaded all possible profiles from Epson or other places that sound logical enough to help with my specific paper. I understand that my screen could be too bright or too dark and lightroom's interface itself could even give the impression of a photo being too bright or dark. I've read about iCC profiling twice, first in software then in the printer. I've used a Spyder3 Print SR and Spyder 3 screen calibrator.
No matter what combintation I try, my photos print too dark of course, but even worse, the color is really off (more than the brightness). Also, I understand there is a lot of printers so it can be hard giving exact toggles in options that might not even exist with ones printer.
Now I'm not nearly as educated as most of you on these issues, so I'm going to ask some questions (sorry if they seem "newbish").
First, I understand (or currently am under the impression) that Lightroom uses something called "MelissaRBG or a.k.a "BastardRGB" to print to the screen (?). If this is true, shouldn't the exporting iCC profile be MelissaRGB.icc? Now if this is true, shouldn't the Host (Win7) look different being set at sRGB than that to what is in Lightroom? It doesn't on my system. So again if this Melissa profile is true, does Lightroom only export in MelissaRGB between the print to screen and whatever given .icc profile you have chosen to export in? In other words, is there only a handshake happening with Melissa.
Second, where does the host .icc start and end. I assume since Lightroom does not come packaged with drivers for every possible graphics card, that the host's color manager has to pass off a matrix for colors to the Lightroom software.
Third, being that the above 2 questions might be out of a users simplistic control and that I can't see what I'm doing wrong, should one just use the basic controls of the printer module? In my case the best prints I get are when I use the printers modules color manager of "Epson Vivid" with a +10 in brightness and +4 in saturation. Of course, this isn't going to help when I want to print to canvas or may other paper types. However, all the profiling in the world with my Spyder3 Print SR might be correct, but I'll never know because the prints always come out way off.
All the trying and failure make me feel like the guy who is barely qualified to make small rocks from a boulder, just give me a hammer. Should I just give up and let it rip with sliders and keep my eyes closed?
By the way, there is really very little found easily through search engines that explain how the profiling should be SET UP on a computer in specific pratice . But yes, there is A LOT that want to walk you through the math and theory of it all, just not how any particular software handles it, not even the operating system.

Answer 1

Just checking off a few things.  You may have done all this and some has been said before, I'm just trying for the complete list:
I think you're saying you've calibrated your monitor with Spyder 3.  As a check, when you check the profile in W7 control panel, it will show the profile you've created with Spyder 3 as the default for the monitor (if not, something's wrong)
I'm not familiar with Spyder 3 software, but does it give you the option of setting screen brightness?  It should be 100-120 cd/m2.  No more.  If you can't set it in the Spyder s/w, try turning the brightness down and recalibrating with Spyder.  You can also use the "Colorimetre HCFR" software (http://www.homecinema-fr.com/colorimetre/index_en.php) to measure profile parameters, including brightness. 
Another check on brightness: get a piece of blank printer paper, and with normal room lighting hold it near your monitor when displaying something white.  Does the screen look significantly brighter than the paper?  If so, it may be too bright.  Modern monitors are way too bright by default.  My HP monitor brightness is set to 15 out of 100 to get 100 cd/m2. 
When printing from LR, select in the "Print Job" area (bottom right in print module) "profile: SPR1900 Premium Glossy", or whatever the profile name is for the paper you're using (I'm guessing the name, I have an R1800).  This is telling LR to colour-mange the printer, and telling it which profile to use. 
Click Page Setup... (bottom L) and set the paper type in the Epson dialogue.  Click Advanced (I think it's a separate tab in R1900, it's a button in Main tab on R1800) and in "Colour management" check ICM and (very important) check "Off (No Color Adjustment)".  I'm not sure with the R1900, but on the Main tab, you may also have to "Mode: custom" and "No Color Adjustment" in the drop down.  This is telling the printer driver that:
colour management is being used (so don't mess with the colours to make them "pretty", which it would otherwise do)
colour management is being done by the application, not the driver (in other words, telling the driver not to do anything itself)
The important thing is that colour management of the printer should be done in one place only.  The method above gets it done in LR, you can also turn it off in LR and use the driver, but I recommend the steps above. 
If all that's OK, it ought to work.  Printed output is never going to be identical to the screen - they're different physical representations of the image - but colour should be fairly close.
You mentioned LR using a form of ProPhoto colour space as its working space.  That's not an issue.  It's just a convenience for LR, and has absolutely no bearing on the output.  The only point is that the working space should be at least as large as the original image colour space, the monitor colour space and the printer colour space (so it's not limiting the colour). LR automatically converts the image to:
the monitor colour space when displaying images (provided you have an appropriate profile set for the monitor, which should be done by spyder 3)
the printer colour space, which you specify when you print, remembering to set the driver as above.