Joe,
The problem is that unless one is holding customer routes in a seperate VRF and dampen them there or take similar steps to segment, dampening leads directly to blackholes. Even in that case, failover within that VRF wouldn't work, as all implementations I've seen attack the prefix as the problem instead of the path vector. Bye-bye alternate paths.
I guess what I'm hinting at is precisely something finer-grained (path not prefix), as you suggest. Per-neighbor enabled, versus "entire bgp RIB" would be preferred. I'm also interested in the *chronic* nature of these apparent instabilities. An average of one flap per minute could imply that the end-site is not getting allot of useful TCP moved, and as such, after something on the (n)-hour timescale, perhaps it's worth suppressing it. So, I'd ask for a long-timescale dampening function, indexed against per-path, and enforced per neighbor. Perhaps as-path lists could be combined with relaxed timers on existing implementations to achieve this today (in a VRF target/context). -Tk