"Also, the article seems to describe a classic Slowly Changing Dimension scenario - and SSIS includes a wizard that builds those processes very easily including full handling of inserts and updates. The flows built by this wizard can be easily customized too."

It's nice to learn something new every day.  Perhaps nobody told me that I was coding a "classic"; but I searched BOL to find the Wizard (it's in the Slowly Changing Dimension Task) and ran it to create a solution in about five minutes... another five minutes to tweak it to include the data conversion from Unicode.  I only included 3 columns vs. the 22 in my original creation; and no error handling or updating of the stageFlag; but it was faster than anything I have done so far.

There is still the issue that the OLE-DB destination does not have a success output flow, so there is nothing immediate to trigger updating the stageFlag on inserts; but the OLE-DB commands both have them.  I do not yet understand the implications of inferred member updates; but that will be ten more minutes of reading.

Perhaps we have part two and part three of this "series" of articles

Thanks again for all the help.