Cubic v. Quadratic

After the past couple of days I can now honestly say that the triangle is by far my favorite geometric shape. Once I got my head around drawing a quadratic curve by mapping the barycentric (texture) coordinates to cartesian (image) coordinates, using Blender's mathutils.geometry.barycentric_transform(), i saw the beauty that is the triangle.
Unfortunately, by adding just one more point to the equation it all gets a lot more complicated. First and second derivatives, Inflection points, etc. (check out the stuff here and here to get the idea). So, I figured, I already have the function to fill in a quadratic curve and I know you can approximate a cubic curve by using 4 (or more for better results) quadratic curves; why not draw them that way? It's a masking tool so it doesn't matter if the cubics aren't exactly cubic. I gave it a go and in most cases it produced acceptable results, with the notable exception of the loop:

The problem with approximating a cubic with quadratics...

It's pretty obvious that the yellow bits should be drawn inside out. However, figuring out what the yellow bits are is a bit tricky. I could subdivide the curves at the intersection. But that would require determining or calculating the intersection in the first place. I'm wondering if it wouldn't be better to take the cubic road after all...