I'm having another crack at making the hair, this time using Fibermesh. I found that if you have underlying mesh grouped, the polygoups will carry over to the fibers, so you can at least layer it neatly; It's still difficult to do long hair with it, the hair always gets arranged kinda flat in relation to the camera, so I constantly have to spin the view around to position it, and it still comes out kinda bended. I think it would benefit from some gravity simulation or some kind of spline guidance.