Instead of asking that people do an initial transfer by hand, or asking them to just add the thing to cron and let it run, there should be a special option that fires up an initial transfer that can be run after the configuration file has been set up. This would give a good time to provide output from a dependency check.

This could also be done without --delay-updates, so that the transferred content is immediately available and so a resume of an interrupted transfer is simple.

Could auto-set verbosity up enough so that the rsync output can be seen. Alternately just recommend that -d be passed to set that.