. . . .Why would anyone encrypt just their home folder? They've simply omitted an extra unnecessary step.
I have a very practical case/reason for that.
I have this situation where I have two separate users. The two users should NOT be able to see each other files (even using a Live-CD session when always admin). At the same time, there are files that both users should have full access to - located on another partition not encrypted.
In that case - the use of encrypted home folder is very usefull.
Btw - the best practice (least amounts of steps to create a user with encrypted home dir) is to plan the installation in such a way that there is no need to have first user being using an encrypted home dir.
And the most efficient method to create a user profile with encrypted home folder is probably using Terminal:
~$ sudo adduser --encrypt-home put-username-here
~$ passwd put-username-here