I wasn't complaining about the aesthetics as much as I was about the whole clunky process.
The easier / more cost-efficient alternative is to use a post-processing effect that mimics some of the aesthetics you're after.
I was hoping that I could pair this with a totally different creation method - if you're not building with triangles, you'd have to build with something else. If you can tolerate a probabilistic rendering method, maybe you could tolerate a more probalistic data representation and sketchy creation process. That's how I meant to address the original topic of discussion.
I have some vague ideas of how you might go about this, but nothing specific.