If most of the noise is caused by hooks, this might not really be a gclient issue, since those hooks come from other sources. A quick test of 'gclient runhooks' shows about 2/3 of the output comes from the hooks themselves, while the other 1/3 is gclient "progress" output.

While that output does look mostly useless, I doubt gclient wants to be so heavy-handed as to just drop it by default. I suppose it could insist that all hooks implement some sort of "--verbosity" flag, which could be set according to the gclient verbosity level, but even with such flags, it's still ultimately up to the hook authors to do the right thing with their logging. Maybe this bug should really be against the specific hook scripts?

thank you thakis@