Not really. Not many people have the whole autotools/automake tool chain installed, let alone document building tools, and whatever other processing the projec

Not really. Not many people have the whole autotools/automake tool chain installed, let alone document building tools, and whatever other processing the project does (eg SQLite uses some TCL scripts). So they'd have to go and get all those, obeying any version constraints. And after all that they'd end up at the same point as getting an archive intended by the maintainer for them to build and install.