Confirmed, that PMPRINTF is no longer required.
It seems that the supplicant works better than the older version (quick test), and the rest works just as badly as ever. At least it can be made to communicate, without too much trouble. FWIW, the main problem seems to be that the IP address is not obtained reliably. Sometimes it gets one immediately, at other times, I need to turn off/on the radio, a couple of times, before it even attempts to get an IP address. The same is true for getting an IP address for the wired NIC.
Thanks for your efforts.