Consider moving away from and/or altering approach toward Makefiles

[anth-volk]

Makefiles are built on top of Unix utilities, so we've had more than one Windows contributor have issues properly running commands. We've also used them in less than ergonomic ways where we probably should've just used local configuration files (e.g., when we determine which database to use for the API based on the FLASK_DEBUG environment variable).

I'd like to find a solution, even if it still uses Make, that:

1. Makes Windows-based contributions easier
2. Enables a broader range of configuration options on run