Passing arguments to homepage controller method - potential conflicts?

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Hi,

I'm hoping for a bit of c5 advice for what I'm about to work on.
Essentially the idea is to have usernames as the second url parameter (www.homepage.com/username) which will render a "profile" view. From what I can see this can be done a couple of ways:

1. Programmatically create pages upon user register using a certain page type
2. Passing the username as an argument to the homepage controller view method

Option one strikes me as overkill for this as I could potentially have thousands of pages for what could be taken care of by something like a single page. Though, unique usernames would take care of unique page naming.

Option two can only really be achieved if the url is accessed like
<a href="<?php echo BASE_URL . '/' . $username ?>">

and not

<?php $this->action('view', $username) ?>

because this would construct the url like "www.homepage.com/view/username"

But if I took the route of passing the username to the view method whilst accessing the urls directly, isn't that going to cause potential conflicts with pages? I.e. Naming conflicts and so forth?

Any help with this would be much appreciated.