to answer your husband's question...
'traditional' weaning, ie with purees would still be likely to be necessary if you were weaning at the 'traditional' time. until only a few years ago, the govt guidelines were for weaning at 12 weeks. no baby would be able to feed themselves by hand at that age, they would all need spoon feeding.
however, if you ask your parents you'll hear that by 6 months babies were being fed by spoon and also were being given finger food.
now that the guidelines have changed to 6 months there's been something of a 'disconnect' in the thinking of HVs etc. they seem to be working on the assumption that the babies who started at 12 weeks took 3 months to 'learn' how to eat finger food and that's why we were all okay to eat toast at 6 months.
but that's not the case, clearly... it's just that we were developmentally ready at that age. babies walk when they're ready, crawl when they're ready, eat when they're ready. (and isn't it an interesting coincidence that the WHO thinks their guts are ready to digest food at around the same time as they start picking it up and eating it all by themselves? )
you can spend your own time pureeing and spoonfeeding if you want, of course. or you can do a mixture of both, loads of people feel more comfortable doing that. but you don't have to.