Yes-we have a ways to go to having realistic hair shaders.

Quote - > Quote - To my eyes the hair variation and style are great-but it looks like drawn hair in an illustration rather than real hair.

I think it's cause that plugin doesn't do nice hair shadows as yet, which is what gives you the illustrated look. And of course the lighting in that render is pretty flat and even so that's also adding to this. But it is beta version render so i'm hopeful these things will be addressed. Ideally we would want a hair system that is easy to style at the macro level but still allows fine detail (preferably semi automated) at the micro level, that does at least half decent light scattering and responds to IDL as well as real lights. And yes which does soft hair shadows without ridiculously long render times. How much of this the Hair room (and that plugin) will do in the future remains to be seen of course.