@dalias I've been chewing on this since I had to write a cups filter last year, and I think raging against cups is good and wise, but I'm not sure queueing is the first place I'd cut.
Some of my printers, even relatively recent printers, take kind of a long time to wake all the way up from sleep and actually accept a print job. I like that I can close Inkscape-or-equivalent without having to verify that the print job has transferred all the way. (I actually broke this aspect of cups at one point, so I have a feel for how it would behave with no queueing at all.)