Here's an option that may be a bigger undertaking but would allow for a ton of flexiblility in different respects. Hope you don't mind me making reference to other softwares? Houdini has a really nice option for multiple groom controls and multiple texture levels from one groom. So in ornatrix terms, OX Guides from Surface. In there you can have the traditional one hair system or you can allow for multiple. The entire groom, the "total fur count", can be distributed across the multiple grooms. So you have inside the OX Guides from surface a check box that is off by default. If you tun it on you can have Hair 1, Hair 2, Hair3 ect. You turn them on as you need them. You can control how much each of the groom goes to them with a number dividing the entire hair by 100%. Hair 1 gets 60 percent of the overall groom. Hair 2 gets 30 percent and hair 1 get's 10. Modifiers in the stack could either control everything or there could be a tick box to say this modifier can do this just to the hair2's. The same would go for texturing. You could have textures effect all the hair or you could have textures that go to hair 1, hair2, hair 3. ect. This would allow you to have loose hairs from clumps and this would also solve the multiple profiles of hairs thickness as well as profile!?
I've found in the past that fur specifically on animals have multiple types of hairs within their fur. I've always added a second groom to things to add random stray hairs...sucks to have to groom things a second time and this would cure that pain as well as add a ton of flexibilty to the hair to simply add variation and colour.
That make sense?
