Mac,
I think the problem is not necessarily Apple's but yours.
I mean, why on earth are you messing around with trying to move the user's home folder ? If you want your "data" elsewhere, and particularly if that "elsewhere" is a removable drive, then just store it elsewhere and symlink to it from wherever you want it.
It is very straightforward to split your data off the system... I keep hardly anything under ~/Users.... but just do it properly and within the constraints of a BSD/Linux type system.
Edit to add: I think I once upon a time saw a way to safely and properly tell OS X that you've moved your user's home dir somewhere else (I'm pretty sure I've definitley seen that option under OS X server, but whether you can (or should) do it on an unmanaged client is another matter).
Last edited by mixture; 19th March 2014 at 10:41.