Hello @Fabby @Stockfish,
I would love to help, if I were able to, if I had that knowledge but I am afraid I will barely can help, if at all.
@Stockfish please read my short uber simple guide on installing Ricoh on Manjaro at the link, but I as far as I can see reading over this whole thread you may have some low OS level issue already (maybe some messed up permission/access issues too). If people here and my simple guide neither could help than I am afraid you may better do a reinstall and start from scratch (if you dont have a Timeshift backup for recovery).
I also struggled with my Ricoh (network connected) for weeks and only the above steps helped (the AUR package for my model and the PPD file from https://www.openprinting.org/printers/manufacturer/Ricoh as per the links in my “guide”.
Today morning, I had been struggling again with another laptop with the same Ricoh, now an openSUSE Leap and I gotta admit that I did sweat blood with it and had spent like 5 hours to get the first page out of it… I love Linux but I do hate it too because of printing compatibility and issues, it is now my worst nightmare to install a printer on Linux, I would rather install a Gentoo linux than try to install a printer on Linux 
Linux simply hates printers, does not want to print on paper. Period Sorry.
Hopefully you will solve it somehow but I am noob for this. In your shoes I would reinstall and setup Timeshift with Rsync full OS + /home backup (including hidden files) and than start with the printer and if anything goes wrong (just a non working line in terminal) I would immediately restore the system and start over.