ostatus causes error when a local profile URL is used as a user URI

When referring to a user profile using a URI, e.g. in an AtomPub post, that URI can not be a local profile's URL. If it is, Ostatus_profile::getFromProfileURL explicitly throws an exception. Since Ostatus hooks into StartGetProfileFromURI before any other plugin, this means that profile URLs can not be used as URIs.

Background: I was trying to write a plugin that works around issue 3120 - namely, allowing nickname based URIs that do not require the client to know the user's internal ID. Using the profile URL, ostatus-style, seems to be the obvious alternative. However, the problem described above prevents this.

I do not fully understand how profile and Ostatus_profile interact, nor why Ostatus would throw an exception when presented with a local user's profile URL. Shouldn't that simply work as well as the URLs of remote profiles?