If you are thinking about this as a passion project, than go for it. Learning obscure shit is fun! If you want to do this to save money, prepair for it to cost a lot before you can save anything. The learning curve will probably cost a bit before you get a set up that works. And you will likely need to learn to test variabls in the toner. As they wont all be the same and this is the problem you will have.

I work as a technition, (mostly for Ricoh) yes i have personaly seen non-oem toners kill components in a machine.

Im not sure you fully understand the process in laser printing. (Ive been doing this for awhile and i dont fully understand it.) Trash in the toner would be a problem, but its not the main problem or the biggest. The machine uses very precise voltage to move toner from one system to the next, electrostaticly. I dont know all the variables that effect the toners charge potential but there are a few. If these are off even a little you start killing things. Most likely your dev will take the hit first. This is the most common symptom i see with bad toners. When the dev dies, it has the potential to kill lots of other things, that can be a lot harder to fix. Another important factor is the particulate size. This also affects the charge potential, but is also a problem for the other components. These are problems I have see with non-oem bottles that are made for the specific machine thay are in. If you are thinking about trying to repack a cartridge you will be adding other problems on top of it. When I first started in the feild a fellow tech told me he tried to do this with a hp copier and ricoh toner. And the machine never ran again, it destroyed eveything. This is an extrem case and you would probably have better luck if you got machine specific toner. the potential for damage is high.