I played with this briefly last year but couldn't get it going in the time frame so I gave up. I wanted to like it but it was a bit unwieldy getting started, and I was not a fan of needing helm to bootstrap an installation. There also was a quirky installation workflow, could not set a key/password successfully for the life of me and it was unclear on if the cli needed a browser?
May have to check this out again, hopefully the quck-start experience has improved.
Sorry to hear about your experience, the getting started experience is an ongoing challenge, there have been improvements in the last year, but we still have a long way to go as well.
Sorry if this wasn't clear, but helm actually isn't required at all, it's just a majority of our examples are written to use helm due helms popularity. The installation hooks really just boil down to kubernetes jobs, so anything that can be represented as a kubernetes job can be used for any of the hooks. This can be a simple script, a helm command, or a complicated custom built application.
The only feature really tied specifically to helm is the catalog feature, which is for building additional applications to be installed on top of an existing gravity cluster. That feature was built around a helm chart as a building block.
The cli should only need to invoke a browser when doing third party authentication flows, ie to use github for login. Using the gravity users invite will also generate a link to send to the enrolling user, so they can set their own password, setup 2fa, etc through the web interface.
May have to check this out again, hopefully the quck-start experience has improved.