What is wrong with leaving in the manual override option? What is crappy about leaving people the option to not install more abstraction layers on things they don't want? If I want enough abstraction layers I may as well just go use windows and autoupdates.
Did you actually read ./configure --help at some point? Is it your vax experience that did not prevent you from blaming pkg-config that is preventing you from exporting LIBCURL_LIBS and LIBCURL_CFLAGS before running ./configure if so you wish? --with-libcurl option was broken and hence removed. If you don't want to use pkg-config, fine, override the flags and there you go. I have just checked it by uninstalling pkg-config and it works fine.
Works for me as well ala:
CFLAGS=-I/usr/local/cuda/include LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/cuda/lib -L/usr/lib/nvidia-graphics-270.41.19" LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/local/cuda/lib:/usr/lib/nvidia-graphics-270.41.19:/usr/local/lib" LIBCURL_LIBS=/usr/local/lib/libcurl.so LIBCURL_CFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include ./configure