RE: AS path question.

it very hard to believe anyone legitimately needs an as-path length anywhere near that long". Worst case, someone is silly with their number of prepends, we don't see their route. I can't say how long I've been doing this...it predates our rancid setup, which means >6 years. Though it's caused numerous dropped routes, it hasn't generated a single complaint.

In your opinion, is filtering of BGP routes based on prefix length also a sign of ignorance? Everyone should just be letting all the crap through?

There is the argument that anyone with that many prepends doesn't really want you to see that route anyway and if anything changed on their end where they really wanted people to see the route and use it, they would reduce the prepends.