[Terretta]

Problem is, both your link headline here and the premise headlined on your blog are flat wrong, and are going to give sysadmins everywhere headaches if clients come across your article and think they've learned something.

The RFC snippet quoted in this comments thread is the right approach: keep a long TTL in normal practice, shorten it at least double the TTL in advance of a change (e.g., if 2 day TTL, shorten it 4 days before changes), dropping it down to 3600 or 300 depending on your tastes, and bring it back up after the change is stabilized.

In the case of registering a brand new, never existed before, domain, avoiding cache poisoning can help.

But DNS taking up to (TTL x number of layers of cache) is not a myth. We routinely see 5 - 7 days (globally) on 1 and 2 day TTLs, and 2 - 3 days (globally) on 5 minute TTLs (thanks to ISPs with 1 day min TTLs).