Those services you mention which give out thousands of forum profile links are usually not worth your time or money, you see the same thing with generic directory listings, they are useless. Unless the forum topic is relevant to your website and they are do follow then don't waste your time.

I've found that signing up to 3 or 4 popular forums and being really active in them is a lot more beneficial in the long run.

Word Separators
Avoid hyphens. Hyphens detract from credibility and can act as a spam indicator. (This is a direct quote from the SEOMoz blog)

Also, Google webmaster tools lets you set geo-location preferences to sub directories. You can do this by creating  a new "site" listing in google webmaster central that also includes the subdirectory, so in addition to having a www.domain.com listing you would create an additional listing for www.domain.com/it (Italy) or www.domain.com/uk (for the UK) and then set the geo location accordingly. When you're creating backlinks and tracking traffic it's logical to do it per location when you are running a directory so that's another argument in favour of sub-directories.

Sub directories are standard practice, however I should mention that if you are aiming for user generated content in this directory and if the topics are broadly varied then you should also consider sub domains. Separating user generated content into its own subdomain allows Panda to penalize low-quality content and leaves the quality content untouched.

Hope this helps