Colour management nightmare

For some years I have calibrated my monitors, and also more recently the printers and papers as well. Even after doing this, the prints have often not been as good as I would like, though actually I don't print all that much. Today I tried to investigate the problem further. After 5 hours of tests and about 12 A4 prints I gave up on trying to get decent results on the Mac with the Canon Pro 10 printer using Lightroom and Aperture. What seems to happen is that the drivers on the Mac ignore the colour management and apply printer colour management on top of this, with no means of disabling this. Needless to say I have downloaded all the latest drivers. An exported TIFF printed using preview and no colour management is better, but of course not really right. On Windows everything works fine. The cheap Epson printer I use for document printing is hopeless for photos - lousy colour, not to mention the white stripe.

So, do I give up on the printer (quite expensive by my standards, and will any other one be any better?), give up on the Mac, or what?

(The Windows print is at the back, with various Mac ones in front).