[mr. k]

OK, what I really wanted to know was if it's better to partition the drive if all I'm gonna do is use some cute tricks to trick the system into looking like it's got the default tree structure (/users even though users is at /volumes/data/users, /applications at /volumes/data/application...). I can see where it would be useful, you could overwrite the system partition without backing up and copying over the data partition. But is bobw right? Is it really worth it to break the disk up into partitions? Does it take more time then it's worth?
Right now I'm leaning toward partitioning it as above. And bob - I thought that the whole point of the swap disk was so things that were supposed to happen in memory but couldn't fit into your available ram were written to a somewhat random sector of your hard disk which was slow, and could cause minor fragmentation. And why let the fragmentation happen in the first place, when you can prevent it?