Exploring further
We found that the main problem was gigapops who
advertise unequal prefix length announcements to their
ISP and Abilene. If everyone’s were equal would be fine.
But we discovered that it’s unfortunately fairly common
for GPs to aggregate towards Abilene and not aggregate
or aggregate less towards their ISPs, very undesirable
So when NLM saw a route and sent traffic to MAX, a
more specific Qwest route not advertised to them could
take precedence, and yet they hadn’t subscribed to
Qwest ISP .  So that traffic would be dropped.
After some attempts to get sources to fix it we gave up.