HPLIP auto install: does it work?

I just bought an HP printer. Then I was installing HPLIP during 2.5 days; more than expected. (Needless to say I was cursing HP the last day). Now I am happy to succeed, but I also feel that it was a good luck. I think this story should be shared.

I am a Linux user since 1998, of rather low geekness. Almost always I use precompiled binaries. Thus I hoped to use auto install (and ultimately did). Last years I use Debian.

It seems I understand now the origin of the problem. People of hplipopensource.com take the current release of Debian (among other distros), and adapt auto-installer to this release. After that, Debian people include this new version of auto-installer to the next release of Debian. And so on. As a result, the auto-installer never works! It always complains that this release is not supported yet.

I installed Debian 7.1 from my (somewhat old) DVDs. I instructed the installer not to use any network mirror. Do not laugh, this is essential. (When I did otherwise, I got Debian 7.4 instead of 7.1 - not supported yet...) According to this Debian release, the Installation Wizard gave me auto-installer 'hplip-3.14.1.run'. Running it I got a message: "Disable the CD sources in your apt sources list". Frankly, I use Synaptic rather than apt. Well, I've found this /etc/apt/sources.list and commented out all CD sources. Running hplip again I saw that it fails to install even gcc. Well, no wonder: no network mirror. I added a network mirror. The rest was rather easy.

So, I got the impression that a not-so-geeky Linux user, like me, have some positive, but rather small probability to pass through all timing conditions before selling his/her new HP printer. Indeed, if Linux is quite new, it is not yet supported. If it is a bit older than needed, a new hplip fails for this reason, while an old hplip does not support the brand new printer (I guess so; I did not try). And most importantly: the hplip site tells me that

    Debian 7.1 supplies HPLIP 3.12.6 and it does support your printer.
    As the version of HPLIP supplied with your operating system supports your printer, you may continue to use that version of HPLIP.

That is true; but it forgets to add that my distro contains an outdated version; it just does not work. What a catch!

Or maybe I am naive somehow? Others seem to feel better. What do I miss?