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?).
It depends on what style you‘re going for. Characters aren‘t exactly my expertise and I‘ve been struggling with hair too. Spent a lot of time browsing Youtube for workflows and it seems everyone seems to have their own method. In the end I chose a hybrid that utilizes planes, the solidify modifier and painstakingly stitching together vertices to get a mesh.
I’m mainly going for an anime style similar to what those gacha games have, although at first I only want it for animation/etc., later on I might want to figure out how to get stuff done more optimized for game engines. Currently I’m planning to go with a shitton of subdivision over some mesh I cut out for a rough shape, then remesh it once I’m at least mostly finished with it.
Check out 2AM on Youtube. The video titles are all over the place but it‘s extremely educational if you‘re going for that style. Not sure if he has a solution for your specific problem, though.