1) You should have a static route for every bgp next-hop, on every router? Including both router loopbacks and EBGP next-hops?
Absolutely not.
2) You should have a static route for every router loopback, on every router?
Asolutely not.
3) You have lots and lots and lots of iBGP sessions not only across loopbacks but between directly-connected interfaces in order to jumpstart the "real" ibgp sessions?
Absolutely not.
4) something else?
Yes.
And that: you don't use "closest-exit" at all, but haul traffic, wherever, around your network based upon steps below the igp-metric step in the bgp decision tree?
Nope, we did.
The only thing that has been clear is that you redistribute statics into BGP, which I'm fairly certain most people already do.
Nope, we dont and never did.
I'm sorry, but so far, I'm not buying how a static net is better. You seem to be trading off the complexity of automatically performing SPF, for the complexity of manually performing SPF. I'ld certainly hate to be in your Ops group when a particular path fails, requiring someone to sit with pad and paper and recompute SPF, by hand, for a hundred routers. On the up-side, the original failure might be fixed by the time the computation is about 50% complete.
Again, there is no static net. Alex