"watch" is described as
With this running as a daemon in the background, you no longer need to manually run git commands when manipulating your files.
and "assistant" is described as
Like watch, but also automatically syncs changes to other remotes.
I would like the behaviour of assistant, without the watch part:
I have an archive of large files, which I think would be useful to manage manually using git. But I don't want to manually enforce the "numcopies=" requirement, playing with the assistant and webapp it seems really nice to have it take care of that.
Is there currently an "assistant-without-watch" option? If not, is it planned?
Not quite.
Recent versions allow you to disable the automatic committing while the assistant is running by setting annex.autocommit=false .. or just by going into the webapp repository list and pausing syncing for the "here" repository.
But, with automatic committing disabled, the assistant doesn't know when new files are added, so will not transfer them. The rest of it still works, so for example if another clone of the repository makes changes the assistant will merge them in and download the new files.
To transfer new files you created, you could use
git annex copy --auto --to someremote, which will only copy them if needed to satisfy numcopies.