it depends for some theme developers it just means they have tested it out and not found any major issues for others they have taken the time to do custom layouts with buddypress specific features in mind. but yes to reiterate most any theme should at least be basically compatible since buddypress takes care of its own layout automatically.
i would only add that a theme which is designed specifically for buddypress can be better depending on your situation especially if the theme dev took special time to do a better job on those buddypress specific pages.
well out of the box you can set up any kind of fields with any label you wish i think a lot of what you need would be covered with text area fields. i would suggest you try it out on a test or stagaging server so you can get an idea for how xprofile works its pretty adaptable as is.
i think you could definitely use buddypress to achieve your goals i think some of the stuff would probably benefit from some custom coding but think even out of the box you should be covered in terms of basic functionality.
really no such thing but you could make a “guest” user then publish the login details on your site’s front end but i really don’t see why you’d want to do such a thing (there could be a lot of un-intended consequences i think).
sorry maybe this is a dumb question but can you even turn off the regular wordpress rss feed? i’d think both feeds basically work the same way maybe @r-a-y can shed some light?
let me know what you think is best i always tend to try to do thing without adding plugins if possible but i can imagine post management might be an issue with the user level method.
