Ok so as the title suggested the Hair Room currently has me wanting to tear my own out.

Thus far I love poser, as far as figures go. The hair, while it comes out looking incredibly realistic, seems to lack any "formulaic" way to style it. I'm not sure if I'm missing anything but it seems like the only way to style the hair is with mouse tools, which thus far seems to be very touch and go. I'm trying to do something relatively simple, just create longish middle parted hair, but thats proving to be pretty hard. The problem with the translate tools is that if I don't have the camera in exactly the right position they wind up dragging them forwards and backwards and I just end up going backwards and forwards trying to fix it.

Anyway, is there an easier way to style the hair? It'd be a lot easier if there was a way I could force the hair to conform to the figure ie; not go through the skin and into the head. I'm gonna put my money on the fact that theres some function right under my nose which I'm missing entirely out of inexperience :P

Much thanks for any help!

tl;dr version: want to find the most effective, and quickest (if possible) way to style hair.

The Hair Room styling tools are just really, really tough to work with.  For the price though it's very hard to beat.  An effective alternative (and a very expensive one) is Maxon Cinema 4D + Hair module + interPoser Pro, likely outside of your price range. 

For avoiding hairs intersecting the figure, use "Do Collisions" options and enable Collision Detection for the figure bodyparts that you want to have collision going on for.  I don't think the collision detection step was necessary in older versions of Poser but it does seem to be required in Poser 7:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3194440&ebot_calc_page#message_3194440

It's not easy but the tools do work. It just takes time and practice.

Ok, thanks guys, i'll keep at it! :D