I recognise most of the above.
From my experience I would never again choose an MFD. (Admittedly, I seldom have need for a fax and it's a fiddle to scan in then fax using a bolt-on app, but I can live with that.) The snag is that if one part of the MFD fails you're stuffed for all its use.
My current setup is a 4-year old cheap Canon scanner,
A HP 3600 colour laser which prints about 8000 pages from a black cart and rather less from colour carts, costing about £90 for OEM and less than half that for clones (which occasionally are dodgy... maybe 1 out of 10 give unsatisfactory results). It's big and heavy and I could use the desk space, and, like others I have confined HP's software to the deepest dungeon I could find.
,
An Epson Stylus C86 Color inkjet, which does all the clogging / self-cleaning / inkwasting stuff which infuriates other posters. Only use this if I require high quality prints. I guess that if I used it more often it would be more reliable, but the ink prices would be stratospheric, considering all the printing I do.
If I really need
really good high quality prints, then online agencies are good and pretty fast.