The one thing you haven't tried with the subsurface scatter is to plug the Diffuse map into both color and SeparateRGB and render with the values you felt comfortable with. That is the way I currently set up SSS for some of my models. Soon I will be looking at darker skin textures to determine what works best for Afro characters. I will try to post the screencap of ghostman's hair shader, it appeared in a separate post but I am unable to find it ATM. However, I did create a custom material MT5 in my Library so it's easier for me to load the nodes into a blank model. The current BB hair shaders for P12 don't work well anymore. I'll screencap that also not that it will mean much to you.