>>Ideally, getting a basic setup going shouldn't take a deep-read of the docs of my package manager.

>Please name one package manager which installs binaries to the user's home directory, but doesn't require updating the user's $PATH.

Do you even realize how little those two statements follow each other? The whole red herring argument here is kind of annoying, but I'll hit it anyways- every package manager that I've used which installs binaries (or anything, really) in the user's home directory (or any directory really) does make me update the path- but it also tells me this and gives me sane errors when that hasn't happened.