Project 5: Helm Charts for Kubeflow Pipelines and Katib — Danish Siddiqui

KFP and Katib users deploying via Helm currently have no upstream-supported path — charts exist but drift from Kustomize baselines silently, with no parity validation or explicit support boundaries. I've spent the last few months contributing to kubeflow/manifests (12 merged PRs) and reading through the maintainer feedback on PR #3237 closely enough to understand exactly what the constraints are. Before writing this proposal I built a PoC branch that gets all 9 scenarios (2 KFP + 7 Katib) to 0% parity diff against the upstream Kustomize baselines, traced and fixed each failure class, and ran runtime smoke tests on Kind. The goal is to upstream that work properly — charts, CI, documentation, and a support matrix that makes the supported/deferred boundary explicit. I also added two things that came out of building the PoC: a scheduled drift detection workflow and a schema validation gate using helm lint + kubeconform, both already implemented and validated.