Kevin,
Those are good suggestions. You (and other members) may not be aware there are limitations on the forum program. It’s a program which is not proprietary to anyone. The forum uses the Discourse program as unmodified. Since it’s an open source program, I believe it can be modified to allow more features. @scottfsmith would be the one to comment on the difficulty of doing that.
As it stands, I don’t believe there is any feature that would allow linking of a member’s intro to their profile page. I will say that you can easily view if a member posted an intro post on the intro page.
Just click on their avatar, and click it again when it comes up to get to their personal page. Then click on the search function (which will search all the posts from that member). Type in “introducing” in the search box. If the member has posted on the “Introducing myself to Scott’s forum”, the search will pull up posts or topics with the word “introducing” in them. You can then click on the post to see it.
For example, when I try that with thecityman it pulls this post as the first search 
I know this is a bit more work than the link to the profile page you mention, but just wanted to offer you something until something else can possibly be figured out.
RE: new users prompted to use map function. Again Scott can clarify if he has different thoughts, but one thing we can do is include a reminder in the FAQs. Something like “Is there a map available of Growing Fruit members’ orchards?” Then in the explanation we could offer a reminder and link in case new members want to be included on the map.