I'm not sure when anything changed, but we got it working. just fiddling. Well, for one customer. The other one we have a session with tomorrow.
Our advice was to use the packages, but if you need to test an app against different version of apache then it might be good. For example, Automattic might have good reason for having for compiling. We didn't dig too much in this case. I don't think the guys we are working with have any say in how they are doing things. If they give some push back from our latest response though, we might have to try...not that I think it is going to go anywhere.