To be fair, its not an unusual behavior. Folks coming from VMS (or windows) try to make Unix look like that. And what did we do with VMS, we added the cshell and Unix tools so people like me could type on it. I'm currently being driven nuts by the simh tool which has a very TOPS/VMS style feel. Everything is help commands. The documents are quite sparse. To me the documents/book (or man pages) should primarily ' go to' and if you want something like 'help' then create it from the documents. But I can not really complain. It's a wonderful tool and its author comes from that heritage not Unix. The problem I remind him is that he will get silly questions from people like me, because we can not find things in his help system - its just not how a Unix program tends to work [I want to look in the index of the document, and find the section myself].
The different worldviews are instructive. c-kermit had a tops-20 cmd JSYS built into it and all the escape completion just worked. The help was quite good, but as with most help systems it was a zoomed in on some hyperspecific topic. For that it was usually good (across all the TOPS-20 and VMS and that ilk), but sometimes you got things like "/GERBILS specifies the gerbils to use" without really telling you what a gerbil was in this context. what you didn't get was how things held together (eg /HAMSTERS and /GERBILS worked hand in hand to control parameters to the rodent models used to generate the ecosystem) or some of the higher level concepts (like what an ecosystem was).
I used to read the raw VMS help files. They were a verbose version of the Unix manuals in some ways, though less crisp in others. It was helpful to read it all to understand, but even so some important concepts were omitted, or discussed elsewhere w/o a proper cross reference.
Warner