The profile update will be very useful for existing users, but I don't think it will help new users join our community. Discourse has made it standard to be able to login via OAuth, write posts in markdown with live preview, easy-to-use notification granularity, etc. I'd be very curious to see a graph of new forum accounts per day over the past 3 years - I have become very quick to link an OAuth to whatever, and veeerrrryy slow to create a new account and password.
If the priority is features for existing contributors, the combined profile is a great next step. If the priority is attracting new contributors, I think discourse just has to be the next step.
About a year ago, the front page article on hacker news was "Is Eclipse JDT dying"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10273849, and it sat there for hours gathering bad publicity until Mike Milinkovich set the record straight. It was a very irresponsibly researched article, but it's helpful to see how we appear to outsiders. Empty mailing lists, ancient forums, can't find source = no new contributors. It's so hard to figure out how to engage with the community, that at least one outsider found that it was easier to write a whole blogpost about how we were dying rather than to create an account and ask us. And to be fair, where should he/she have asked? And would we have replied if he/she had? I wouldn't have, because I couldn't have posted a helpful link anyway ;-)