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I dont worry about the hit I just look for high skilled people then accept the marriage and choose the prestige option to lesten the hit. Regards it is possible to play a matralinial game once the game comes out. Just restart if you get a male son so it eventually spawns female that will work.

On the demo I was playing as Duchess Toscany and was doing well with three daughters and a strong possition. If I could have saved that I would have played matraliniarly as no need to worry about bastards in that game.
 
I wanted to try it out.
I had noticed that as the dutchess you could spend prestige on adopting the emperors culture.
As Duchess of Toscana, you can offer fielty to the king of Navarre while being in HRE, spend 50 prestige on adopting your new rulers culture or wait til you have ruled for 10 years and then change the succession law and then figure out if you want to stay. Relations with the emperor and others gets a traitor hit but he didnt go to war over it. Later the king of Navarre got a claim to my dutchy when i left him and we waged a war. You can get into relation problems with your vasals if your vassals and court are mixed basque and italians (so you should get back to italian culture and try not to hire too many basque nobles as they are given your culture) My first kids had italian culture and the other half basque culture marking when i changed culture. It almost solved my culture problem when i died as my heir was italian. My succession turned into nasty civil wars with a bunch of my relatives and vassals ending up in jail and i was given the nickname "the accursed" for some reason. My chancellor spent most of his time working on relations. I look forward to try it again and plan a little better. I liked absolute cognatic better then the other alternatives.
 
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Re matrilinear marriages: I found a couple of first-in-line heirs for smaller titles who could be bagged this way. Sometimes heirs can be found hanging out in courts other than the ones they stand to inherit, and the ruler of that other court won't care in the slightest about where your target is in someone else's order of inheritance; they'll weigh the marriage as if the person was any other random courtier (which is of course what they are, to them). The heir will then move to your court and be available for a title in your realm. It's rare to find an unmarried heir in someone else's court, but it can happen; there are at least two counts and a handful of barons in this situation during the demo.