The ratio of times autotools checked my system for a Fortran compared to the number of times I compiled something with a Fortran dependancy must be at least 200:1.
Unfortunately the defaults are what they are and many people don't care to fine tune their builds.
It took years for the GNU maintainers to publish a libtool that fixed this bug, and then years for libtool users to upgrade to the new version.
I hate GNU so much.