I do agree that if your needs are complex, you're better off compiling from scratch/playing sysadmin and last night it felt I probably should've did that to start off with. Thanks for the link on more CLI tricks.

Hopefully the future iterations of MAMP will build in PECL/PEAR support into their product. I don't think I needed to compile PHP to get things to work, I think I just needed to move that file. Since I did those compilations steps first, I have no way of knowing which steps produced the desired effect. I recommended the file moving because after doing the compile steps, I still received the error. Only after moving that file did things work. I have no way of telling if the compilation steps had any influence on that outcome.

In my opinion, if you need PECL or if you need to compile php by yourself, Mamp is just not the right tool anymore. It's lame, i like their UI.