Fedora considers curl-minimal

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the real problem seems to be that the protocols are compiled in, as opposed to being something external that is dynamically loaded.

If they're dynamically loaded, then you would only have one version of any given binary, users can decide exactly what protocols they want to install and protocols that are known to be in an uncertain state can be labeled as such.

This moves responsibility from the distros to the curl maintainer, which means we don't have different distros running in different directions and nobody really knowing what they're installing.

Of course, that's a lot more work than just compiling the code twice, but it only has to be done the one time whereas protocol selection and recompiling would have to be done every time there's a code change. Not that this happens much with curl.