Mac OSX 10.8 does not recognize HP LaserJet Pro M1213nf MFP

Question

This is probably an obsolete system support problem.
This LaserJet Pro M1213nf is an old product from HP that I just recently (~3 months) purchased from a vendor as new. The MFP system is flawless and except for the occasional scanner tilt in grabbing the sheet from the automatic document feeder, works perfectly.
Unfortunately, when I bought it, I used an old Macbook with Snow Leopard to test it. Worked beautifully. I recently purchased a new Macbook Pro with Mountain Lion, and it does not work with that. This Macbook is going to be my primary system from now on.
Googling this problem has convinced me that neither HP nor Apple intend to support this, at least not anytime soon. Updating drivers from the store has not helped. In fact, each time it has happened, I have had to uninstall the new driver, and install the old Lion version of the drivers (see below).
Current status:
1. It prints without a problem. It copies too, but I don't really use that a lot.
2. It scans but only with the HP Scan application bundled with the Lion version of the driver. (which was the last major version where this was supported)
3. Image Capture, Preview, etc. do not work with this and the OS does not even recognize the scanner.
I installed sane-backends to work around the problem but I have not really invested a great deal of time into it and that did not help.
My question is - how do I hack it to work with my Mountain Lion install natively? I use Linux regularly, and have absolutely no issues compiling software, tinkering with things, using open source software, etc. My understanding is that Mountain Lion has changed the interface for scanners and that new interface is not available for older scanners.
Why do I need this to work? Well, I scan a lot of documents and there are some AppleScripts I want to use to do some standard post scan processing to reduce PDF size. The native HP scan application that comes with the drivers is an irritating piece of crap that wastes my time everytime I need to do something.
And I am not going to throw out a perfectly good MFP just because Apple and HP want to generate some undeserved profits off me. Good hardware always trumps artificial commercial software choices for this engineer.

Answer 1

Just saw your reply. I am not sure what you are suggesting.
I have the following in my Mac Harddrive/Library/Image Capture/Devices folder:
Canon IJScanner2
Canon IJScanner4
EPSON Scanner
HP M1130_M1210 Scanner
However, the icon for the last mentioned is different. It does not have the Image Capture icon. It simply has the generic application icon (two white papers with an "A" formed out of a ruler, a pencil and a brush). I doubt that the icon makes a difference, but it is what I observe.
The permissions for the first three and the last are identical.
The file sizes for all the files are in the same size range (except for EPSON, which is much bigger).
I should reiterate that I am using the Lion version drivers on Mavericks (just upgraded from Mountain Lion yesterday). Those are the newest drivers for this MFP.