I understand their position and think it makes sense in terms of what NVIDIA should support for the general industry - it’s likely most developers using HairWorks will be larger teams, and that makes sense you’d want your artists to stay in the art package as much as possible, since they aren’t usually going into the engine like on a small team or sole dev.
I’m not an artist either, so that’s exactly my thinking as well. Trying to use art packages is a nightmare for me, and the first thing the HairWorks pipeline tells you to do is use an art package + third party plugin.
Staying in engine is always faster for me generally, and Epic already took approach somewhat with the destructible mesh tools etc. I think it makes a lot of sense to have part of the pipeline inside UE4.
Even better, to start with. Though I mentioned exporting to .apx because of all the parameters and stuff the viewer tool has (setting the textures and all that), which would take longer to recreate in UE4 than just the Maya/ part of it.
I’m going to begin toying with it in the next couple of days , I’ll fork your repo for it.