[Answered ]-How to solve this complex recursive problem, pyramid point system

I think your problem could be that you aren’t setting the child(s) of profile to now have parent as it’s/their parent, unless children with parents can’t also be parents in your system (which I do not believe to be the case).

Alternatively (or possibly together with the previous), you may want to just do parent = profile.parent rather than parent = profile.parent.get_profile().

EDIT: And I see that you did indeed switch to something of that second form, though using user instead of profile.

Anyway, since each user can have multiple children (as you stated in a comment on another answer), you might want to keep track of each user’s child from within that user’s object. Something like…

parent = user.parent
user.parent = parent.parent
parent.parent = user

children = user.children

for child in children:
    child.parent = parent

user.children = parent.children

for child in user.children:
    if child is user:
        child = parent

    child.parent = user

parent.children = children

for child in user.parent.children:
    if child is parent:
        child = user

This probably needs refactoring, though, and I may have missed something.