I still haven’t worked out whether it’s better to keep a regular update even if it’s “I’m an idiot and got stuck again” or just not say anything if I’m that stuck.
So after combing the hair into the right shape, I found out a few things.
while the collision detection works really nicely in particle edit mode, it completely fails when actual physics is applied, because for whatever reason the emitter collision is completely ignored I can’t work out for the life of me how the hell to rig particle hair I’ve done spline IK for the tail rig so was trying to do something similar with the hair but don’t understand how particle weights work.