You seem to have repeated what I just said.
Does "/dev/printer/0" exist without the lp module being loaded?
If yes, that is wasteful like the current system.
If no, you must go outside normal filesystem semantics and talk to a
_non-existent_ inode as if it exists.
Drivers which are not explicitly hot-plug need some sort of "kick"
before the kernel knows it needs to load a module/driver. Having that
kick come in the form of open(), or worse stat(), is the part I don't
like. Creating a file implicitly like that just seems alien to the
traditional Unix fs.
Jeff
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