I thought I was on my last attempt. I was going to try a few more things, and then give up and make a million curve guides again and down the line nut out soft body on curves (I probably need to nut it out anyway).
The problem I was having was that it seems that regardless of whether or not the emitter (the entire character model in this case) was set to be a collision object or not, the hair would clip straight through it when I got it to drop.
Zara does not have this problem, but she also has very short hair which I put a non-zero pin goal strength on because it sticks up a little. This made it flop without cutting through the hair. So I decided to try the same thing with Gundry but despite a miniscule number (0.001), I still ended up with