I do understand the reasoning behind preferring customer routes. However in the case where a customer of a customer also connects to you directly via peering doesn't it make sense to prefer the direct connection? or at least not prefer the customer learned routes.
In our situation, we were buying transit, heavily prepended, from a provider on a tiny circuit. The purpose of the transit was related to another service we were acquiring from that provider and wasn't about the transit, but the transit was needed for the service to work reliably. Unfortunately this provider was also a HE customer and so we now had all of the HE traffic coming down this tiny link, since all of our other transit providers and ourselves only peered with HE.
I don't remember why, but we couldn't have the transit provider not announce our routes toward HE, so we ended up doing the announce more specifics everywhere else thing. Which I hate doing on so many levels.
Thus the desire for a community to tell HE that although they learned this route from a customer, it is not a customer route.