Thank you. Welcome to the forum.
I had found out that I needed HACS but the bit about HA not booting until it receives data from the weather station was a show stopper for me.
However I did read that HA version 111.0 goes some way to fixing this. I have updated to 111.0 but will wait until I see if it fixes it.
Cut and paste from BLOG
However, with this change, Home Assistant no longer waits for all integrations to be ready. As a result, not all devices and entities are available immediately.
This is actually good! As this means, an integration that got into trouble, can no longer prevent the frontend from becoming available. Also, as soon as it is available, you can change or remove the configuration of a non-working integration. Finally, it easier to check out your logs when something goes wrong.