Agree it's annoying (I'm one of the co-founders) but it's the minimal 'eval' to make sure users succeed to maximize the value from their downloads. We mainly push them to slack and to share monitoring and logs with us, until they get to prod
Translating, after a period you spam users with marketing designed to get people who had a poor first impression to spend time getting a second impression. Informing users who didn't make the effort to google for support where the support channels are. I imagine it helps get the people who want baby sitters, but it certainly drives away the people who don't want baby sitters. I guess it makes sense if you goal is to sell managed services.
Most of our users automate it. When you register, you are given access to the repository file for your preferred distribution. Once you have the repo, you can just apt-get it into every one of your nodes.
Also Scylla provides non-gated access for AWS users with ready-to-consume AMIs
