I think going mad on people who have no concept of what’s involved with hair is useless. I was asked to do “hair” for messiah so often I can’t even count it anymore. People with no idea of coding simply can’t appreciate what that means.
BUT: A particle based fur should be possible in a first step to fill the most pressing need. I found the hair in “Elephants Dream”, done with blenders open source particle based hair quite satisfying and Weggs Hair tests look like they could guide to a good intermediate solution if given some internal workout from pmGs side.
Full styleable hair is not only about rendering and basic hair directions, but a whole concept of tools not currently available in the messiah interface. So that sure is a whole different shebang 
But I am with the people here who ask for streamlining and update animation first.
Another area where messiah is very much lacking is NPR. Outlines and some painterly stuff would help the addressed audience a lot (see Davids work).
These are things in reach (other than a full styleable hair solution).
Put that in with an Edit Sphere overhaul where plane and full free 3D movement works as simple and reliable as single axis manipulations and a lot is done. Then I would buy an update for 250.- € without much questions.
And: I don’t think anyone is trying to “rip off developers” here, but not anyone has an understanding of the time needed for even simple things and 2.) not anyone can throw out money as he/she would maybe like to (nor is it the users fault if there aren’t enough licenses sold to support development).
Times have changed and when XSI Foundation 6 is at 499.-$ you have a hard time to explain why messiah pro should be more expensive, even if the price of XSI may be pure madness.
From the users side, things look very differently, and - as Lyle explained quite some time ago - this will also lead to some people giving up on development completely. Between extremely capable open source software like blender (mainly hindered by it’s GUI) and cheap mass-high-end tools like XSI Foundation, it is almost impossible to place something “made by hand for a living” if you can’t show why it is better than the rest for what it does.
messiah still has this opportunity but it has to become way more simple and streamlined to work with it in a mixed app environment (see Silo/modo).
For me, the problem with pmG/messiah from day one was that the people doing it were too involved in their own universes to be really aware of the importance of the basics. This hasn’t much changed from 1999. The parts where this works are the parts that keep people at it - superfast rigging, no weight painting, expressions etc. But then there are areas (different ones for different people) where people are going mad a million times a day. For me it is the edit sphere and camera navigation (coming from XSI), for others it is inactive keyframes or multi-parameter editing or the missing search and replace in expressions.
For beginners it is things like F1 not being Help and instead Help being buried in a right-click on the File tab but not being available in the normal File dropdown…
I know just too well how often this has been reiterated already - and I know f***ing well why.
The “world” isn’t good or bad towards pmG, the world simply doesn’t care.
Create something indispensable and people will recognize, use and love it - and pay for it.
Leave too many quirks in it (especially in the basics) and people will go elsewhere.
Listening to you, Taron is like listening to Stahlberg telling how easy it is to create good female characters 
It may be true for you individuals, but it surely isn’t for everybody.
So, to end this long post: Both sides, users and pmG have to move. The users look willing to… 
Have a nice day!
Cheers,