The debian packaging includes the user-facing static libraries ('*.a') and libtool metadata ('*.la') files. In the rpm spec file, by contrast, they are built and then promptly deleted (and not packaged).
Although this situation is not optimal, it's not a bug. Unifying the treatment of these library files in debian and rpm would mean either dropping the files from the debian packaging (and passing --disable-static to configure in both debian and rpm), or adding them to the rpm packaging.
Of these two alternatives, dropping from the files from the debian packaging is a non-starter because jewel is a stable release. And adding them to the rpm packaging is also a non-starter because their inclusion would violate the packaging guidelines of distros that use RPM.
Finally, the issue has already been resolved in master by 70bbf1aded87ae7f72ac653fab5ffa325bdf0f83 and 4ba2bb750b3de11c9cd75beb289b7d92677c7e13 (which are not backportable). So jewel is the last codestream that will be affected by this.
The conclusion, therefore, is to let it be.