Just done a quick timing test to get an idea of the difference the strand based hair should make (quite late in the day and with a big project taking up lots of memory in the background, so ignore the actual figures and look at the difference between them).

Sydney with hair three (prop hair), standard render settings: 63 seconds
Sydney with hair two (strand hair), standard render settings: 12 minutes 20 seconds!

It's not normally that slow, but the ratio is about right.