What other official ways of creating stylized hair exist?

The NURBS path method didn't really work out for me, and obviously neither the realistic hair nor low-poly would work for my workflow/style. While being much harder, I tried various attempts at just modelling the hair as a mesh, it looks closer to what I want, but still pretty cumbersome to do, and still not perfect.

I'm currently wondering if there's some stuff I haven't found (maybe some plugin I don't know of?).