At least that's what I keep telling myself as I'm internally screaming my way through laying out polygon feathers and thinking about how the curve/particle feathers were easier (even if I couldn't get them to look nice) and there will be more experienced people than me out there facepalming and headdesking or both like why the bloody hell did you go and overcomplicate it like that for when you could have just done {some technique I don't know about that does the same amount of work in less time with better results}.
This malarky is purely because I wanted to be able to assign materials per feather.