HP Director and drivers alternative?

I've had a HP all-in-one (printer, scanner, copier and card reader) thingy for three years now. The hardware is good, but I've come to a point where I can't work with the driver software anymore. It's making me angry and frustrated.

When I first got the machine, I installed the driver package from the CD. I didn't understand the need for 500MB of drivers and software on my system, which makes it a mess. So some weeks later I tried to install the minimal driver package from the HP website, but they "forgot" to add the card reader drivers to that one.

I went back to the full installation package. The HP Director scanner software is a piece of ****. Seriously. Whenever I want to scan a sheet of paper into Photoshop, HP Director shows up and it gets scanned three times: first right away for the preview function, a second time after I click the "remove moiré" button, then finally a third time when I'm satisfied with the settings and click on the button to actually scan it.

It's awfully time-consuming, especially as I always have to adjust the DPI, the contrast and the section to be scanned.

In the manual it says you can make "scan profiles" and set them as standard. When I do that, HP Director can't remember that I set it as standard and I always have to load the settings again for EACH sheet of paper I want to scan. I usually have to scan a bunch of papers, so for each sheet I have to adjust the settings and wait three times until the scanning process is done. This is a thousand times too much.

I'm fed up with this user-unfriendly ****. HP Director hasn't had any major update in the last four years even.

Are there any alternative minimal HP drivers that support all the functions (even the card reader) or will HP ever give us consumers a better software?

I know about Shareware like VueScan, but I would prefer Freeware solutions. Sure, I also could switch to another printer brand, which I would really like to, but I like the handy, cubical, space-saving look of the HP printers.

Edit: **** = excrements