It's interesting to me that people who know better often confuse basic routing (which I'll call next-hop-reachability) with policy. Most of todays routing systems are only concerned with next-hop-reachability. They don't address policy at all. To me policy looks like "you go in the slow lane because you're not paying as much as the guy who goes in the fast lane".
Most of the routing policy discussions I've seen recently seem to have gotten side tracked on some form of tag-switching. The tag-switching seems like a way to prop up slow Ethernet switches and dumb ATM switches instead of addressing the real policy issue.
I think ISP's will (or do) want to charge different rates for different levels of service. This means policy should determine what path the packets take, not reachability. I don't think the policy has to be very complex, but it has to tie together the policy mechanism at a router port (like bandwidth limiting and fair-share) with the end-to-end path (like you take the oc-3 and the other guy gets the oc-12).