I have been defeated by BGP+MPLS

Today I failed BGP+MPLS for the 3rd time. During the exam I thought I had it this time. Many of the questions were repeats and I felt pretty good about the answers. I did do better this time, but I wasn't quite there.

I'm throwing in the towel on this one. I'm pretty sure what's killing me is that I just don't have the practical experience with BGP.

Jumping in to CCIE studying would certainly give me the hands on. I was hoping to use the CCIP to springboard into that, and to be honest I feel like it has already served that purpose. I understand the concepts of MPLS pretty well, I think it's just some of the peculiarities that are throwing me off.

So what now? I've had it with this exam and I'm giving up on it. I was hoping to be into CCIE SP studying by the end of this month. I really want to recertify my CCIE R&S by the end of the year as well.

That basically leaves me with three options:

1. Take the BGP and MPLS exams separately. I think that would be helpful because the score reports should be a little more granularized. That way I should at least know what my weaknesses are. The BGP+MPLS score report is pretty vague.
2. Take the R&S CCIE Written again to renew my cert and then decide what to do next.
3. Jump straight to the SP CCIE Written. I might end up failing it repeatedly as well.
4. Jump straight to studying for the CCIE Lab. I should get enough hands on experience with MPLS to come back and knock out the CCIP after a little while with it. Of course once I'm a month or two into labbing it up on the IE, I probably wouldn't want to bother backtracking for the CCIP.
   

I think I'm going to knock out the BGP exam because I shouldn't have any problems with it. Then, depending on how that goes, I'll regroup from there.