I can speak from experience that what people see as some dark conspiracy is more likely the ineptitude of the people responsible for the "design" in the first place. Very few products ever get to market in the form they originally had and almost none ever escape the "Oh SHIT what do we do now!!!" moment during their testing.
It's easy for people unfamiliar with product development to believe the brilliant genius fallacy they see on TV shows and in movies. Designers and engineers are the same as your dipshit neighbor who drives through his own garage door or takes off to work in the morning with her purse on the roof of the car.
There is certainly ineptitude as you say but when you install a counter chip in a printer that "forces" you to change a part after a determined number of copies that's not ineptitude but planned.
My HP printer has the same chip in all 4 of it's toner cartridges, luckily, I did a quick search on the internet and read where to go in the settings to override that setting. I run it right down to the point where the print quality starts to degrade before I'm "forced" to change cartridges.
There are always trade-offs in the design of things. When a product takes from 3-5 years to go from a concept into a product on a store shelf, most products are already obsolete before the first one is sold.
That's simply due to the advancement of technology.
The fact that your printer needs a "waste toner" tank, screams poor design to me. One of those "Oh shit, what do we do now?" moments in the product development process. They probably noticed that it was dripping toner out the bottom and the easiest fix was to put a "bucket" under it to catch the overflow.