Poor print quality w/HP printer after Pages update

After the last two Pages updates the print quality to our HP Color LaserJet Pro M2xx series printers has been terrible. Colors are now off, fonts are jagged, images look soft/airbrushed. Even when we've updated the printer firmware & the print drivers (from HP!) nothing fixes the print quality. HP even replaced a printer for us (after months of back and forth), but that never fully resolved the issue.

So, here's the details, maybe someone here has a solution.

The first printer, an M252 model, printed superbly from AirPrint. Then, Apple updated the OS and we updated our machines for the security patches, etc. We could no longer use AirPrint as the print quality was atrocious and super slow. Like, nearly 10 minutes for a print from Pages, Illustrator, etc. We plugged in via USB (not the most convenient thing to do with a shared printer), and that seemed to help with speed and quality, but we still had the issue of losing our network capability (even directly plugged in via Ethernet didn't help). Oddly, printing from a Windows 10 VM was both speedy and color accurate via WiFi. Same physical computer hardware, different OS. Definitely points to a driver issue.

So, after much back and forth with HP, including upgrading/downgrading firmware/drivers, they sent us a new printer.

The new printer, an M254dw model, was fine (different drivers and we figured out the magic set of settings), until Pages was updated to version 7.0 (FYI - this was an automated update, which should never have happened as that setting was deactivated a while ago, not sure how it got reset). Now, colors are too red, images that were coming out sharp are now blurry (think overly airbrushed), font output is barely better than a dot matrix (yep, that jagged). Fool me once...

I don't see this as an HP issue any longer. It seems to me that Apple is messing with the print drivers/print subsytem, which isn't playing well with HP printers. I don't know if anyone else is having similar issues with other printer brands/models. Let me know if you are, that would certainly make my "It's Apple's fault" argument stronger.

The printer is used for business printouts that go to customers. We print a moderate amount on this printer, but it does need to look mint, and right now, it looks terrible. If anyone has any solutions, please let me know.