Personally, I think they were talking BS.

Looks like an 'expensive' system, but that redirect off the front is definitely going to hurt you.

I was looking at an example the other day in DMOZ

http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/

It's the only top-level DMOZ category with outbound links in it. That page has high page rank, and passes lots of it on to the pages it links to....except for two poor guys who do a redirect off their front pages: DMO and Commonwealth Secretariat. They each get a big, fat zero for pagerank.