Print quality - good, bad or indifferent? Your opinions sought.

Here is the message I wanted to send (gremlins in my keyboard) :-)
Hi all,
Well I have followed some of the threads in this list and have seen quite a few comments about LR's print quality. As I am very happy with it I would be interested in finding out exactly what people don't like about the print module and the output quality.
Maybe I am happy with it because my lack of darkroom experience means I cannot seewhat could be better. Maybe it is because I inprt mainly in B&W with some toning or lith effect grain added. I don't know. I certainly don't print in full blown colour.
Just to provide some extra information I use a Mac with a 21 inch LCD screen that is calibrated using a gretagmacbeth "Huey", an Epson Photo R800 and a professionally created icc profile for, mainly, Hahemuhle Photo rag paper. A4 is the largest size I print on (for obvious reasons). LR manages the colour through the profile, print resolution is 360dpi and sharpening is High.
So the question remains what do others find wrong with their prints? Or is it just a case of having to find something to groan about?
I await your responses
Andrew.

I believe that what Morey was originally thinking was that ProPhoto RGB values were being sent to the printer, and the printer had no idea what to do with them. I quote Morey:
"Never the less, the user needs some way in LR to define what color space is sent to the printer when MBR is enabled. Today it is delivering ProPhotoRGB color space image regardless of the embedded color space..."
As per Andrew Rodney's comments above, I don't think this is valid. I very much doubt that a printer gets RGB values along with an embedded profile like ProPhoto RGB... essentially telling the printer 'here are the raw RGB values, and here's the color profile to interpret those RGB values, now you're on your own printer... go 'head and convert to the PCS and then to your CMYK space...'. Seems illogical. Seems much more logical that LAB values (as in the LAB values in the PCS) are sent to the printer, and then the printer profile (an output ICC profile) maps values from the PCS to the printer's CMYK values.
So, it doesn't matter what color space your image is in, as long as your printing software is doing the conversion from the embedded color profile to LAB.
That being said, I still can't get prints worth a damn from LR... they all come out dark and over-saturated. If they happened to come out dark and *under*-saturated, then I might also be 'fooled' into believing that the image looks like unconverted raw ProPhoto RGB chromaticity values (generally very dull)... but I don't think that's the issue at all.
There's either something wrong with the way LR and PS are using these printer profiles, or the printer profiles are just bad to begin with. I'm not ready to jump at either conclusion, though the fact that 'Managed by Printer' gives me prints that match my soft-proofed view in PS makes the printer profiles suspect. The fact that 'Managed by LR' OR 'Managed by Printer' BOTH give me the same colors in LR leads me to believe something's wrong with LR, simply because it's not the case in PS, and PS is a much more mature program than LR. Yes, I'm going out on a limb in making that comment :)
-Rishi

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