Hi there, papercutter here. Love your feedback and it’s doing the rounds of the product team all the way up to the big boss right this very minute!
For your technical challenges, I suggest a direct chat with tech support. I’ll DM you (if I can) to explain why and provide direct details, but for those watching along at home, I’m not prepared to talk about OEMs without their input or permission publicly. Sorry.
HOWEVER, I will say I personally think your advice is sound. I don’t think it’s ideal for complex school environments *checks calendar* today. I think you hit the nail on the head in this line: “... a product born in the cloud in its infancy”. Very true. After 20-something years working on the MF codebase until it's at the peak of its powers, we’ve built PaperCut Hive from scratch in the cloud. My personal view is we’re at early adopter stage, I don’t think there’s any getting away from that.
And that applies to education. While MF has years of innovation and refinement (and roadtesting) in literally thousands of schools, PaperCut Hive (and let’s face it, cloud print management in general) is in its infancy. PaperCut Hive is working extremely well in education facilities with limited technical needs that are looking for excellent cloud security and scalability. But for richer features, nothing in the cloud’s going to come close to PaperCut MF for features. Nothing. Yet.