Help Understanding User & Profile Questions/Information
Ning To Jamroom
The reason it is part of the profile data is that in Ning Users and Profiles are always a 1 to 1 relationship, so in some ways the data is interchangeable. It also seems that most Ning sites want to display some of the answers to their sign up questions ON the profile, which is easily doable if the data is part of the profile. It's doable as part of the user data as well, but would require an extra jrCore_list call to bring in each user associated with the profile and show the data that way.
So it's really up to you - the "cleaner" way is probably to store that data with the user account info, but the "simpler" way is to have it be part of the profile. If you're always going to have a single user to a profile then either way works.
Let me know if that helps.