To clarify, I don't gripe with trade print houses, I have our monitors reasonably calibrated (could always be better but it's pretty good) check my files carefully, pre-flight them in acrobat, shoot 'em off and know that they're going to just hit print. It's true, they aren't getting paid enough to mess around and that's why proofing costs extra. Makes perfect sense to me.
If something comes in totally off, I do try to find the problem to prevent it again but, in this last case, ate the cost of the mis-prints willingly. If someone is unwilling to get onto the same page with color, I don't hassle them, just move on. With the cost of short runs fairly low and a lot of it getting drop shipped you just have to keep moving here and stick with what's good.
I do think all trade printers should specify the color space they want and provide templates and presets to save. If you don't, how can you hope to get close enough? Color is subjective but only to a degree, it's the modern world baby, there are many tools at their disposal to produce reasonably accurate CMYK color prints. We bust our asses to know our substrates, our inks and how they will interact, I expect similar from others in the biz.
