I’m not sure I understand the issue entirely. Surely you can configure CMake to run makepanda to build Panda inside a subdirectory of your project? Again, there’s absolutely no requirement for you to install Panda into your system for you to use it. It is fully self-contained and can be run directly from the build directory.
Is there maybe something you could share about the way you set up your previous project to build OGRE and Bullet, so that I could get a better understanding of how this works? If this is something that can be improved in the way Panda is built, I’d love to look into this.