Node Profiles, Subform Elements and Register Profiles

I think I'm getting confused about what modules I ought to be looking to in order to do what I want. I started playing with Drupal when 4.7.x was current, looked into node profiles, usernode and registerprofile, then backed off and had a look at integrating CiviCRM data onto my registration form. Since then I've discovered that teh data available to me in CiviCRM is not good enough to identify existing members so I'm back looking at node profiles instead.

What I need is on registration to force users to give me some extra details about themselves. This should be a node profile and I will create other content types that they can fill in as part of a node family but which are not compulsory (I want to give them points eventually for filling in more information about themselves).

So I came back and was looking at the discussion about porting registerprofile to Drupal 5 and then I saw fago's references to subform element and node profiles.

So, am I right in thinking that, when this development effort is finished, one should be able to place a subform on the registration page made up of the node profile compulsory bits I want to capture at registration time? It seems a better option to me than registerprofile, and I can't quite get the patched version to Drupal 5 working anyway. So, should I focus less on that solution and more on this subform-element/node profile stuff?