Internally, we always have Nodes. A node is the lowest level "thing" and is the thing that effects are applied to. A Node may have more than one "light" or visible coordinate. (for example, in a "custom model" that only uses "1"'s, there is one node, but there are multiple coordinates for that one node). A "Strand" is a group of Nodes that would make up one grouping. This is normally for things like Mega Trees and Arches and Matrices. The model is then the group of Strands. If there is only a single strand, we tend to not display the single strand though as those effects can just go on the Model and accomplish the same thing.
If you got strands and not nodes, that would be concerning. Not sure how that would happen. I'd expect the reverse.
