Note that excluding directories excludes them everywhere in the directory tree that's being compared.
It depends on the syntax:
*.* | .profile\ excludes .profile everywhere.
*.* | \.profile\ excludes .profile only in the base directory of the sync operation (not necessarily in the drive root!).
*.* | \subfolder\.profile\ excludes .profile only in "subfolder".
And indeed you can't exclude .profile and include a subfolder of it, because excluding a folder means skipping it as a whole.
What you can do is exclude all FILES in .profile but still keep the subfolders:
*.* | .profile\*.*