Yes, like scaredyfish said, this type of thing is easy to do with bendy bones. There is even a tutorial where someone rigged a dragon neck with them:
The one downside here is that they can’t be exported to game engines.
Edit: I just remember that Michael_W mentioned in this post that blender’s splineIK doesn’t support twists. You have to create drivers to handle that type of movement. Maybe that is why you found blender’s splineIK frustrating.