You're right, I should have just payed attention to what my perl dist was returning from 'perl -MExtUtils::Embed -e ldopts'. My mistake was that I assumed DynaLoader.a was something that would be present in all perl versions, as I had seen in the past, and since I wasn't seeing it in this case, I thought that I wasn't giving the right input to the 'Configure' script when building the dist from source.
I was further confused by something said in the Configure script:

A number of extensions are supplied with $package.  You may choose to
compile these extensions for dynamic loading (the default), compile
them into the $package executable (static loading), or not include
them at all.  Answer "none" to include no extensions.
Note that DynaLoader is always built and need not be mentioned here.
[download]

I incorrectly, but understandably interpreted this as meaning that I'd see DynaLoader.a or .so appear in the end distribution (as had happened in the past), not that it had actually been merged with libperl.so.

@ native]$  strings /usr/lib/perl5-my/5.10.0/i686-linux/CORE/libperl.s
+o |grep boot_DynaLoader
boot_DynaLoader
[download]

You've put me on the right path, thanks shmem.