Merge the concepts of 'Profiles' and 'Custom Fields.'

Is this the right place to start this discussion?

In my experience, users just don't grok the differentiation between Custom Fields & Profiles, and I think the UI could be streamlined quite a bit by making 'Custom Fields Groups' something that happens in the background. (The separate permissioning is also prone to causing errors which breach security/privacy. I've seen it.)

A very common task when first configuring CiviCRM is for a user to want to collect some custom information during user registration. Currently, the process is:
Create custom field group > Create Custom Field > Permission Custom Field Group > Create Profile > Add Fields to Profile > Ensure Anonymous users have permissions for Profiles. I'm not even going to count the number of page loads this requires.

My thought is that this can be greatly simplified by making custom fields a 'feature' of Profiles, rather than a separate entity. Those blocks of data that appear on a contact's page as a field set or tab? Those are "profiles" too (which might not be exposed to the world).

I think this would greatly improve usability and efficiency.