it's a prominent example of the "cathedral" model.
Second, just because there is one bad example of a cathedral, doesn't mean the cathedral model is bad.
Many years ago, a fella named Gettys (look him up!) wrote as part of sage advice for OSS philosophy:
"The only thing worse than generalizing from one example, is generalizing from no example at all."
right, but this could be applied to your example of the "configure" script as an indictment of the "bazaar" model too. Surely there's software that's come from the "bazaar" model that you feel is of high quality ? There's none whatsoever ?