I just discovered that Vuescan now supports my all-in-one HP C7280, purchased mostly to scan from a feeder tray handwritten (pencil!) notes and solution sets written over many years. I *had* been using the HP software (which would dump to a bunch of low-contrast jpegs), then post-processing using ImageMagick command-line tools.

Vuescan makes the workflow incredibly faster--rapidly scanning a batch of pages into a single, high-quality, remarkably compact PDF file, precisely what I want to accomplish. It also permits, as it always has, saving a custom set of settings into a convenient initialization file, so that I never again have to set by hand multiple parameters, as I did with the HP software.

As others have said, it has been very good for a very long time, and keeps getting better.