On the other, it's a pain in the arse that it's specific to a handful of distributions.

I had a V33, and I use Void. At one point I was able to get it shimmed together, there was a wrapper package for the vendor-specific modules, but eventually it stopped working, so I went to the Goodwill and came home with a Canon LIDE 100 that Just Worked with SANE.

I'm not sure what I'd do if I had to buy new. It feels like the entire consumer scanner market is sort of dead. I can recall when you could go into any computer/electronic big-box shop and see a bunch of cheap little flatbed parallel (or eventually USB) scanners for like USD50 or less. They were a common sweetener in the name-brand PC bundles of the late 1990s/early 2000s. Now there's virtually nothing under USD100. It feels like it's a solved problem, too-- most home users don't need ever-increasing resolution or scan speed, so they could just keep cranking out 20 year old already-amortized designs.

I was having a hard time (the laptop runs very slowly although it is an i5 with 16GB of RAM) so I installed hplip on my laptop and printed it from there.

I had to smile at how easy things have become in Linux that Windows got me frustrated and Linux solved the issue so quickly.

If you buy hardware for personal use, buy what has upstream support instead. If it works out of the box in a Linux desktop today, it will work in ten years time just the same.