That’s a terrible user experience.
That’s because letsencrypt-auto itself does not have a --help switch. It’s just a wrapper around the letsencrypt client. Your --help switch would have been passed to that command, but would not have bypassed all the installation parts of the wrapper script. This is to be expected. You could have deducted this from the docs.
Note: the current state of Let’s Encrypt is beta.
This is thanks to the overreaching handholding attitude that plagues the project. They don’t know a thing about K.I.S.S.
Edit: Trash the official client and use acme_tiny.py, much better if you actually know what you’re doing.
Well, that's actually the huge problem with 90 % of the topics here 
No clue what so ever about TLS and server configuration/operation IMHO.
Well no, it's not. That's my whole point.
And this is beta feedback.
Depends. I don't think the letscript-auto wrapper is here to last. As far as I know, it's meant to be temporary. A means to install the client on distributions where the repository doesn't have Let's Encrypt included.[quote="bgiddings, post:5, topic:7639"]
And this is beta feedback.
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You're free to improve the code on github.
Hi @bgiddings, thanks for the feedback.
Several people have mentioned this issue before – it’s tracked as #1903 on the client GitHub page.
I think we would be happy to change this behavior and the change will happen sooner if someone sends us a pull request to change the code.