I ended up employing RIP on the backbone VLAN between the 3 routers on the network I'm setting up for the landlord. I had written a script that would enable or disable a route depending on whether its gateway could be pinged or not, and I was trying to figure out how to extend it with the ability to ping a router 2 hops away (ISP router) through the backbone, and at that point, I started wondering if perhaps these dreaded routing protools I'd been warned about would in fact be simpler.