Fur! At last, appreciably pretty fur! It has been quite a slow to reach this goal but at last I am making real progress. Although I am loathed to admit it, XGen is indeed going to be the tech choice for my fur. I hate. I hate working with it and struggling against it's terribly hamfisted implementation in Maya 2015. But, it does everything I need it to, after a bit of cajoling.

This image demonstrates fur of lengths varied according to specially drawn maps, as well as colors assigned based on the same maps used to build the shader network. It also features a crude means of directing the fur to "flow" in certain directions. It's not great, but at least it's not sticking out perpendicular to the surface of the model.