Automatic hair/fur plane skin weighting

So, been a bit busy of late with work, projects (I'm building a custom e-bike with various bits ordered from China) and also a community farm project that takes up my time. A post on here is way, way overdue... I don't know where the time has gone.

The tool I'm going to cover here automatically skins hair planes based on an underling mesh, and ensures that each vertex in a single hair segment has unified skin weight values to preserve (as much as possible) the shape and volume of each piece as it deforms.
This is definitely aimed more at the games developers that don't have the luxury of using the various hair/fur shaders, but it should be of general interest for anyone looking to write skinCluster related scripts.