I've been reading this question and felt that I don't quite agree with the statement Separation of user and profile data is a nice touch.
As I see it, profile data, such as, e.g. country or whatever belongs in the user object, while separating such data into profile leads to creating a new object (and table) with 1-to-1 relation to the user object. Is such separation considered a good practice merely because of aesthetic reasons? (You see only user input data in one table and generated data is in another)