You don't necessarily need to get the latest if you're installing to the harddrive. The detection stuff that the beginner install gives you probably won't be of any use to you anyways. And you can use apt-get to update your packages once everything is installed.

The only thing you have to consider is that you'll have the older version of KDE. So you'll probably be wanting to update that, which can be confusing for some people. But as long as you don't mind doing a lot of updating and fixing dependency issues here and there and such, there's no reason you have to get 3.4.

With that said, don't be afraid to try 3.4. From what I've seen, it seem like the latest release fixed the biggest issues people were having.