Accessing All Sharepoint 2010 User Profiles

I'm attempting to iterate through all User Profiles in SharePoint 2010 from a Silverlight application that will be added to a SharePoint page. Based on what I've learned, the User Profile Service is different than the SharePoint Website's store of a list of users who are "members" of the site or have ever visited it. To get that list of users, see this question.

I know about the asmx web service that SharePoint 2010 provides at mysite.com/_vti_bin/UserProfileService.asmx, but that doesn't seem to have anything like a GetAllUserProfiles method. The closest it looks like I can get is by iterating through all users with successive calls to the GetUserProfileByIndex method, but that's far from optimal.

Is there a way to access User Profiles via a built-in Sharepoint 2010 REST-ful service, such as what's provided for site links at mysite.com/_vti_bin/listdata.svc/Links? If not, what approach do you recommend to get all existing User Profiles in SharePoint 2010?

EDIT:

The purpose of this is to provide summary profile information in the Silver开发者_开发百科light control. For example, showing the User Profiles that have the most "Interests" set in their profile. This task is only possible by iterating through all User Profiles.

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Are you sure you want to do this through a web service? Getting all links for a user means 20 simple urls. Getting all user profiles means 20,000 large complex objects.

Iterating through all profiles is something I have done in import code, but outside of that I can't think of a scenario where it wouldn't make more sense to use search - especially when user interaction is involved.