A quick question - are you able to get this working with, say, Mental Ray and Backburner? I just tested here in a very simple scene, created the .stat files to bake the animation, rendered using Mental Ray and Backburner, and the render nodes acted as if the hair was non-animated, they did not use the .stat files. This was "one frame to one machine" and not strip rendering (multiple machines working on the same file).
Would be interested to know if you have this working with any other render engine, and if any special steps are required to get that set up (such as, the .stat files must be on a network drive or something?)
I also tested with Corona and Backburner, but of course same result, the frames did not show any result from the baked animation from the nodes.