In reply to the original. Hanon or no Hanon makes no difference if you don't know what you are doing. Doing the Hanon exercises "wrong" will leave you at the same spot you started, older, more tired, and without having learned any music.
Finger development, and more generally technique development require intense intellectual work, combined with experimentation and training. Traditions running deep to the likes of Carreno, Anton Rubinstein, Liszt, Letchetizky, Breithaupt, Matthay, Godowsky and more recently Taubman and Golandsky would suggest that if you have a teacher giving you hints and making on the spot suggestions about the how of playing you have a better chance of developing virtuosism and a vast tonal palette. Hanon does nto seem to me particularly good ground for that type of development, although some times it is indeed helful to isolate tone production from music making, so that you can really pay attention to the simplest movements and sensations involved in playing.
If the Chopin etudes appear too difficult, there are two things you can do: rather than study a whole etude, learn just a few measures. The same benefit you would get from Hanon you can get from, for example, the first two measures of Op. 10 # 1.
I think the absolute best place where to start developing piano technique are Bach's two-part inventions. Once you have those, then the Well-Tempered Clavier and Mozart's sonatas. Then the Chopin preludes and etudes. By then the vast majority of the literature is at your disposal. Liszt EET, Brahms Paganini variations, Scriabin etudes and Rachmaninov preludes and etudes tableaux cap the standard literature and if you can play them you basically can play anything. For trascendental development, Chopin-Godowsky. Not for the weak of resolve, though, but enormously rewarding even if you don't get to play them well.
Much of piano technique is actually having a mental image of the musical object at hand. A chord, a progression, a polyphonic texture, once understood fit easily into the hand. In that sense, you are much much much better off taking little portions of pieces, particularly baroque and classical, than spending an hour a day of Hanon.
Czerny paves the service road to Beethoven, but then, I think you get much better results from learning, for example, Op. 14 # 1 or number 2 than practicing religiously Op. 299.
That said, I love Op. 299 ## 6, 7 and 13, so I play them for fun and for their musical value.
So there, I too think finger exercises in general are of little use if divorced from specific musical objectives.
Topic: Hanon and Schmitt