You're flattening a panel of curly maple and it keeps tearing out. So you do the things. Fresh edge on the iron. Chip breaker set close, right up at the edge. Slower passes, lighter passes. The figure still lifts and chips in patches, and now you've got a board that's worse than when you started. At some point you give up on the plane and reach for the scraper, the way you reach for it every time, as the last thing you try after the plane has already made a mess.
Here's the part that often goes untold for years. The scraper wasn't the last resort. On that board it should have been the first tool.
The reason has nothing to do with the scraper taking a thinner shaving, which is the usual explanation and isn't the real one. A well-set plane on a good day takes a shaving about as thin as a scraper does. They're close to even on thickness. The difference is in how each one cuts, and they cut in two completely different ways.
A plane cuts by splitting. The edge starts a tiny crack in the wood ahead of itself, and that crack runs along the grain a little before the iron catches up and severs it. On straight grain the crack runs where you want it and you get a clean surface. On figured grain, where the fibers dive and rise and reverse, the crack runs down into the board instead of along it, and lifts a chunk out before the iron gets there. That's tearout. Everything you do to fight it, the high angle, the tight chip breaker, the keen edge, is an attempt to control where that crack forms. But as long as the plane is cutting by splitting, the crack is always possible. You're managing a failure mode, not removing it.
A scraper doesn't split. The little hooked edge on a scraper cuts by compression. It crushes and shears the fibers off rather than starting a crack ahead of itself, and a crack that never starts can't run down into your figure. That's the whole thing. Grain direction matters enormously when you're splitting wood. It matters far less when you're compressing it. So the tool that ignores grain direction is the one to reach for the moment grain direction is the problem.
Be careful how this gets said, because it often gets said loosely. People say the scraper "works on figured grain." That's not quite right. The scraper works because it can't trigger the thing that wrecks figured grain in the first place. That's a different claim, and it's the more useful one, because it tells you when the scraper helps and when it won't.
So here's the decision, plain. Manageable grain, mild figure: stay with the plane, set the chip breaker close, you're fine. Hard curl, interlocked grain, the stuff that tears no matter what you do: scraper. Burl, the worst of it: scraper, no argument. Don't run through the whole plane routine first and arrive at the scraper defeated. If you can see the figure is severe before you start, start with the steel that can't tear it.
One note on burnishing, because there's bad advice in circulation. People will tell you to draw the hook with a screwdriver shank. It often doesn't work, and there's a concrete reason. To roll a hook on a scraper, the rod you're burnishing with has to be meaningfully harder than the scraper itself. A modern scraper is hard. A lot of screwdriver shanks aren't enough harder than that to actually move the steel, so you rub and rub and get nothing, or a weak hook that folds on the first pass. Use a real burnisher. It's a cheap tool and it's the one part of this you can't fake with something from the drawer.
Which is the nice thing about the scraper, in the end. It's the most democratic tool on the bench. No bevel-up plane, no back bevel, no fitted chip breaker, no premium iron. A flat piece of steel and a harder piece of steel to draw the edge. It works because of what it is, not because of what you paid for it. That figured panel that humbled your best plane will surrender to a thirty-dollar card and a burnisher, and it won't ask you how long you've been doing this.