I think you misunderstood his point: it's not the knobs, but the vendors. Generally, when you're trying to integrate random crap into an otherwise well-structured network, you'll find OSPF available, but very rarely IS-IS.
We never really want to talk IS-IS with random crap - in that case the protocol of choice would be BGP.
I run into this a lot in the security appliance space, where you want your security appliances to either learn or advertise routes internally (VPN tunnel reachability is a big reason for this), but also in devices such as load balancers and other middlebox cruft that occasionally needs to participate in routing advertisement/subscription. ... The ones who actually care about making it work almost always include RIP and OSPF, with a few shout-outs to BGP. IS-IS (and OSPF v3) rarely makes the cut.
We've found that BGP works reasonably well to talk with such boxes, and also that BGP is generally available. Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no