scrapers vs sandpaper

Scrapers are best on already-smooth hardwood, to take the place of the final sanding. Taking the splinters out of a pine 2x4 from Home Depot won't be as successful

What they don't tell you is that you will spend a lot of time sharpening
blades, or $$ buying them. You also risk gouging the project or
slashing your fingers on the blades.

To minimize sanding:

Carefully inspect the wood you buy, and select the smoothest pieces.

Use the right grade of sandpaper for the sanding job: coarse to take off a lot of roughness, finer grades to get the last bits.

Use oil-based stains and finishes so you don't raise the grain of the wood, and seal with alcohol-based shallac before you use water-based finishes.

Use an "orbital" sander instead of hand sanding, and use one with the biggest sanding pad you can. I sand before I cut or assemble because it saves a lot of time.

Nathan, you're not alone.  Sanding is a tedious pain.

The first step to breaking your dependency on sanding is learning to use planes. They're tedious and fussy, but once you learn how to use them to smooth a piece of wood, you'll love it. Unless you're willing to make a big commitment to woodworking, buy used and recondition them.  There are a large number of reputable dealers who will recondition them for you, and sell you the plane at a fraction of the cost of new. You'll need to learn to sharpen though.  Christopher Schwarz has excellent articles and books on the topic of planes, and they're well worth reading.

If you can use a plane to get your surface reasonably smooth, your sanding load becomes much less. In fact, it's easy enough that you might find you no longer need a powered sander, because hand sanding gets the job done so quickly. 

I use and love scrapers.  They only work for wood with short stiff fibers though. Pine is almost impossible to scrape (you might be able to scrape a little on southern yellow pine). Oak is trivially easy to get good results, but the wood is hard enough that you're going to get a terrific workout and/or need a masseuse if you aren't acustomed to it (I did both). They're also a bit tedious to sharpen. I don't have much trouble, but my dad, who is much better at sharpening than I am in general, can never get his scrapers to a satisfactory edge.

You've gotten some good advice here, although I'd be careful going down the plane path! I've been down that road and it's a lot of fun, but can get to be a whole new hobby in itself, especially if you like tools.... As far as sanding goes, first thing I'd recommend is a random orbital sander. Doesn't have to be new, in fact a good used one from Craiglist or the pawn shop will be much cheaper and still do a good job for you.  For the softwoods Ana recommends for the projects here, depending on the roughness of the wood I'm working with, I usually start w/either an 80 grit or 120 grit sandpaper, then work my way up through the grits, depending on whether I'm painting or staining/sealing. For paint, my progression typically is 80, 120, 150, 180, then prime and paint. With stain/sealing, I go up to 220 grit, precondition, then stain, then seal. The other thing I will tell you is that I spend the most time on the coarser grits. If I spend (hypothetically) 20 minutes sanding at 80, I'd spend maybe 15 at 120, then 10 at 150, and then just a quck run, 5-7 minutes at 180 and 220. Use the coarser grits to remove the roughness, then progress through the smaller grits making smaller and smaller scratches until the wood is as smooth as you like. Be sure and wipe/blow off the dust between grits and after the final grit, then you are ready to finish. 

Finishing is my least favorite part of the build, but for me at least, it takes at least as long as the 'putting things together' phase. That sounds like a lot of sanding, and it is, but w/the ROS, it goes pretty quickly, and the quality of the finish is really good (at least that what I'm told by those who get the things I build...)

Be sure and protect your eyes and lungs when you are sanding, safety glasses and a good dust mask are important here.

What kind of sander are you using  If you are using a orbital or detail sander on a large piece it will take you a long time to make it smooth. If you are doing a table top I would recommend a belt sander to knock it down and finish with a orbital. As far as a scraper the do work good on hardwood but they have to be sharp and you will spend a lot of time sharping them.

Over the Christmas holiday I surfaced a lot of pine with a plane. The results were incredibly smooth.  While I haven't thrown out my sanding blocks, I haven't used them a lot since either.  In fact, the only time I pull out a sander now is when I'm smoothing out the surface of some plywood.

The warning about picking up a new hobby is nothing but the truth. I've had to become very careful about buying planes.  Since my (admittedly small) cabinet is currently overflowing with planes, I'll now only buy a plane if there's no way to do the job with another tool I already have, and I need to think about it for a while.

In fact a couple of weeks ago, as I was packing up to move to my new house, I found a couple of planes that I'd forgotten about.