My mind is set on tension maps — there is no plan B! 
The only alternative I can think of so far is to use bones and shape keys to directly drive the opacity of predefined parts of an image, but I don’t know whether that’s possible or practical at this point. I’ll probably put in a feature request, however based on their workload I expect it would take some time to implement even if they were interested, so I’ll need some sort of stopgap in the interim.
If they’re not interested though, and the add-on remains in its current state, then I’m not sure if I’ll even be able to reach the level of my old LW wrinkle tests, let alone surpass them. 