Yeah, but I'm not trying to do development of a product; I'm trying to learn the stack and/or comparatively evaluate the software for fit for a use-case. When it insists on being configured to run in "JVM-eats-all-your-RAM production mode", even though I want to operate it in "stay out of my way because I'm running you as a background service on the puny Pentium-M Macbook I develop on" mode, I get a bit miffed.
And this is the same software that behaves perfectly reasonably when installed as a package directly on a Linux box; it's just when it thinks it's being used over the network because I'm running macOS and it needs to be in a Linux sandbox, that it starts acting all aggressive.
At least give me a flag to let me explicitly tell the software to relax!