A mixed bag of 3ware

Right after I upgraded the firmware on a 3ware 9650SE RAID controller in my desktop, the card failed. ‘lspci’ would recognise it, but nothing else.
I RMA’d it with 3ware, and within a week and a half – bearing in mind there was New Year in the middle – I had a new card couriered to me. Superb service.
My desktop machine has been reformatted and reinstalled, and it’s running much faster than before. The only downside is 3ware seem to insist I download 57Mb of JVM and InstallShield to install 3dm2 and tw_cli… why? Why can’t I just have the files and install them myself? Why do I have to run a JVM as root? That scares me a little.