Since when is BGP a bug-free protocol? Let's not forget the BGP best path selection algorithm itself is broken (there are circumstances under which it will NEVER converge on a best path see ietf draft on IDR route oscillation). Not to mention the various malformed AS-Path bugs which have shown up over the years. I took a vendor class once where they made us do a lab where we had to run BGP w/o an IGP, in a later revision of the class they removed that lab because they decided it was too much of a nightmare even for a lab environment.
BGP is not a bug-free protocol. BGP is the easiest protocol to *debug* when the problem shows up. BGP does not help to accidently affect *unaffected* paths when a problem shows up. It looks like everyone forgot the reason for this discussion to begin with. It is the outage caused by a mistake on a single router that affected parts of the network that were *NOT* affected by the original mess. Please not that this discussion tends to get restarted whenever we have a real OSPF (or ISIS) caused mess. Alex