It feels a little strange to have a free tial version that don't let you try the profiling function.

That's one of the most important function i'm looking for and I have no plans of buying something before I have tried it.

Actually Profiler works fine in trial version.
Did you check "run profiler with debugger" ?
In this case profiler will run with debug session automatically and after it is finished you'll see the profiler result.
Alternatively you may click Run Profiler (Alt-F9).
It will run profiler w/o debugger.

The only difference of the trial version is that it does not show nor analyze more than just 10 lines. But you know trial version is not intended for any real work...

I thought it was "disabled" (both "run" and "run profiler" buttons were gray, whereas "run in debugger" was green) as well, only to discover I had in project properties under mapping something other than "System default" selected.

As soon as I switched to "System default", both functions got enabled.

(Hope it helps )