Actually, J, they do have a unique numeric ID field for each profile. The redirects needed sound like a major nightmare to me, though, especially when you consider all the merged profiles that already have redirects and all the links that are in the biography sections. On top of that, you'd need to train all the members in the new ID that each profile would have, which is much less meaningful to them than the current IDs, even allowing for the sequential numbers appended to the LNABs. It's not just the records in the main table … I don't know anything about their architecture, but would expect that there are 2 or more additional tables used to store parent/child and spouse relationships that would also be impacted. Now that I think about it, it's more like a database apocalypse than an ordinary nightmare.
PS Grrrrr!!!! I just noticed that I've apparently been involuntarily logged out.