The rules are not clear or intuitive. "If you are making an attack roll you are making an attack", it doesn't say you can not do an attack without an attack roll but at the beginning of the making an attack section it says making an attack roll as part of a spell, an attack with a melee weapon, etc. At that point it could be clear, but then some maneuvers are attacks and don't have an attack roll. You have the camp that says they are the only exception and another one that doesn't consider them exceptions because it doesn't say explicitly you can not have an attack without an attack roll. Then you have the spell description, targets you with an attack, the book uses the word in different ways, attack can be a verb, a generic noun, an action, a noun which references a particular rule, etc.
However it works well if you consider a magic missile an attack or not, the second option makes the spell a bit stronger, choose what suits your game better. I was using it as an attack but the other way makes also sense and from now on I'm going to use it. I was also using the area damage wrongly with the mirror images, we've practically not used the spell but next time I'll use it correctly if the situation arises. You can always learn something.