Hi Ron,
I do have a plain automake linking to automake-1.9 -> works. I also have a automake-1.10 binary. To test it I removed the empty "" from the loop and, voila, it worked. Now back to your problem...
I guess what happened here is: The for-loop tested 1.10 first. The awk-version-check failed here, so the for loop continued with the next iteration, testing 1.9. This time the version check worked. So you were using 1.9 again.
Michael