I've started working on providing a userfriendly way for filling out the nodes of a profile in a through steps.
I started with providing a unique url for each content-type which restricts its number of creatable nodes per user to 1 - as it happens for a nodeprofile content type.
Now users may add/edit their node of this type at the path 'nodefamily/CONTENT_TYPE' - of course this path can be url aliased. :)
Next I'll write a module, which allows the admin to define a route through some pages or node forms - so that users won't get lost... ;)