user profiles

With the vast amount of profile as nodes implementations, how do you set up your own profiles on your sites?

What I am really looking for are what modules are deprecated and rarely used to the more flexible and complete user profile solution.

Does anyone who is serious about creating complex and dynamic profile(s) ever use profile.module and if so, why?

Do you use any custom coding, and if yes then for what?

I am really looking forward to creating a profile solution for one of my sites and I want to maintain a clean back end and flexibility.

Hi all!
As a part of my course on Usability Design at the University of Leuven (Belgium), I'm doing a user and task analysis on Drupal.
I have started a user survey to collect useful data on the users of Drupal. With this data, I will create user profiles and personas to reflect some typical user groups of Drupal.

The survey can be found here: http://drupalsurvey.vanisterdael.be/index.php?sid=76524