The death of People and full adoption of Membership and Profile
But alas... what I've always wanted was that two-way street for integration. The provider model makes this easy enough, but you more or less have to let this user data live in its own little world. That was always obvious to me, but I've let my own sites and projects dictate the best way to rewrite the forum, which is stupid. That's the very reason I've had to shoehorn things into that format.
So taking a clean-sheet approach, I've spent the last few evenings refactoring the providers and ditching People entirely. It's liberating. There will be some SQL scripting to deal with when it comes time to deploy in my own sites, but when it comes to user data, it should be the last time I ever have to do it. The benefits are already clear with some peripheral projects I want to do, and even a theoretical single-login system across all of my sites. Good times!
I've been so energized to write code again lately. Not sure why. It's odd that when I was slacking, er, being self-employed, I wasn't motivated to do much of anything. Now that I've gone back to a day gig and talk to people smarter than me, I'm spending my free time writing my own stuff again. My personality is seriously odd.