I can only speak to 2007, in the Shared Service Provider you can configure full and incremental imports of user data. Is this not an option in the 2010 User Profile Service? If it's there, you can set up a weekly full import on any day/time that you wish and set daily incremental imports.
Since it looks like this is not an option any longer, the timer job or scheduled PowerShell script might be th eonly options.