Hehe, yes, it’s under the hood as messy as at the surface.
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The different build options makes sense. For development you want a fast compiling. For the release version you want all the bells and whistles.
I beg to differ: first of all, while developing such a large software, you do not recompile everything every time you change a source file: ‘make’ will sort out what needs to be recompiled based on the file(s) you changed, so using a smaller set of features does not lower (or only very marginally) the recompile time anyway. Second, you’d better make sure that your changes won’t impact negatively release builds, so you do want to test your changes on a release feature set each time.
I confirm: definitely a messy build system ! 
Just curious, do you even have Cuda installed?
Got only the runtime libraries (the proprietary ones, straight from NVIDIA’s drivers download site). The build message about missing CUDA was therefore not much of a surprise to me, and I would need to install the (huge: over 1Gb) CUDA devel toolkit from NVIDIA (no such package in PCLinuxOS repository either).