I can’t believe they’re up to 40. I remember installing Fedora Core 1 like it was yesterday. Yum (and now dnf) has come a long way. It used to have to individually retrieve metadata files for every available package, rather than using a single compressed index of all the packages available in the repository you were using. It made just getting to the stage where dependencies were calculated take forever.
I don’t do much scanning, perhaps 5 times a year, and it’s sufficient for my needs. I can definitely see how it leaves gaps if you do a ton of scanning.
I have a Brother MFC-L8900CDW and it works great for printing and scanning on Linux (I use Arch BTW). I use SANE for scanning. You can also set it up to scan to a Samba share or ftp location.