Id suggest skipping grooms altogether and using Blender’s hair to comb the cards directly.
There’s a somewhat hidden option that will align the mesh with the hair particle, including respecting the particle’s lenght.
This allows you with some styling work (which is a nightmare even for a hair stylist, had one try) to directly edit and curate the cards to use in engine without needing the groom.
Usually, we make the hair cards an apex cloth material with a dedicated (vertex color driven) mobility value thats rather low but enough to add some visual feel (If you prevent self penetration it works best, but costs more).
The flow maps are also somewhat important to bake, for complex grooms at least. So anyone wondering why the material doesn’t look quite correct should try out setting up flow maps in the material (and baking a flow map out).
Even with cards, .24 had issues with point lights and lighting hair in general.
This could all still be true even in 5…