I think I found the solution on my own, but now I have another, bigger problem.
The reason why the content area appears to still be present in both profiles is because I attributed a background color and a border to
#ja-container .main
Making this element appear on the home page where before it was invisible.
Now the issue is that I need that container to have those properties because that’s what the design I am replicating calls for it. I have tried alternative treatments of the content area but they don’t work on the other pages.
What I would need is a way to but exclude the home page from that rule. In Joomla 1.5 and the no Jat3 way of building a template, that would have been a simple matter of writing a conditional just for the home page. With Jat 3 I don’t know how I could possibly overrule the global css so that I can restore #ja-container .main to being invisible on the home page. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.