[DanielHB]

Printers seem to be a solved problem and they mostly use zeroconf which uses mDNS (multicast DNS). I have done a bit of work in the area and I didn't run into the problems you mentioned.

However I had very semi-strict control of my network, but used plenty of random routers for testing.

[zamadatix]

Link-local multicast like mDNS can be a bit simpler to wrangle than routed multicast. For the link-local case a lot of the interop failure cases with network equipment just devolves into "and it turned into a broadcast" instead of "and it wasn't forwarded". You can still run into some multiple interface issues though.