Of course, your right about what needs to be fixed! But situation with cogent is such that I do not have that option. Their peering link with level3 is congested because of all the traffic going to AOL and some of traffic destined to me is going through same link the other way and getting jammed as a sideeffect as well. I route aol-destined traffic from my net to provider other then cogent - but how do I tell AOL and L3 (and only them) that best path to me is through somebody else? Basil is right - the best way to deal with that would be for cogent to provide special community that would allow me to direct cogent to prepend several of their ASN to level3 advertisements.
If your circuit is full one way, it really makes no sense to be bothered dealing with reverse path *before* fixing your forward path. Fix the outbound (saturated) first, *then* look at the rest.
Alex