I have been following a thread on drupal.org for a while now, and a solution to the content profile link is now available.

This is the situation. You want users to go directly to a user's Content Profile when you click on a username. At the moment you get directed to the account page, this is where the book tells you to add the big button.
Still this isn't ideal.

Well now there's a patch, and hopefully soon it will be added to the Content Profile module.

It redirects users to the content profile, and then allows you to redirect the content profile edit tab to the users my account page (only the account owner can then go to the my account page.

Brilliant, this now does away with the argument for overiding the user page.

The thread is here, the patch is comment #55
http://drupal.org/node/661572#comment-2663766