This was posted in the forums under Module Development at: <a href="http://drupal.org/node/146972">http://drupal.org/node/146972</a> It has received no responses (so far). If it receives no responses here, as well, then I have the answers to my questions.
<br><br><p>I wanted to attach a fairly large number of variables (fields) to
each user's profile, and the UI for displaying and updating (editing)
"that many" variables was not to my liking.</p>
<p>At the moment (in 4.7, anyway), profile variables can be put into
"categories" (apologies to jaza and bdragon, but that is the "official"
description of the way that profile fields are divided into separate
and distinct groups). When a user profile is edited, the various
categories are displayed as links near the top of the first edit
screen, with the first edit screen focused on the "account settings"
category. Those with user administrative privs can add additional
profile fields and each field can (actually, must) be placed within a
category. I believe that there are no restrictions on the number of
profile fields or the number of profile field categories, although I
certainly haven't stress tested it.</p>
<p>The "edit user profile" UI currently loads a separate page for each
category. That separate page lists all of the profile fields associated
with that category, in the order specified by the normal Drupal
weight/alphabetization mechanism. There is no ability to group the
fields in a fieldset.</p>
<p>I have a simple module that allows those with user adminsitrative
privs the ability to assign each profile field to not only a category,
but to a fieldset, as well. </p>
<p>Would this capability interest anybody else? By that I mean is it
worth my time to spiff up the existing module I have so that it becomes
a contrib module? Like many, I don't want to go through the effort if
there is either no interest or, in the extreme, negative interest.</p>
<p>At the moment, the code can only handle a fieldset depth of one.
That is, only one level of fieldsets for each category. Of course, each
category can have unlimited fieldsets, but they remain at the same
level - one beneath the category. The design of the database
modification, however, leaves the door open for unlimited fieldset
depth (not that anybody would ever use more than 2 or 3 levels).</p>
<p>In addition to someday allowing for unlimited fieldset depth, at
some point I can see adding a "report" node allowing for a screen
report to be generated with the contents of a given category/fieldset
combination. Since users aren't nodes in 4.7, views can't be used to
generate a report of this nature. </p>
<p>My discussion on #drupal and #drupal-support lead me to believe that
there is not much involved here which will be different for 5.x,
although I haven't looked into that myself, yet.</p>
<p>So, the question is, does it make sense for me to put "yet another
profile extension module" in play? Translation: would you find this
capability to be useful?</p>
<p>I believe that I have checked the existing profile modules and none of them implement this functionality.</p>
<p>Assuming this to be a useful thing for some people, would it make
more sense to fold this capbilitity into an existing profile contrib
module rather than create a separate contrib module?</p><br>