Ok,

So it looks like my assumption was correct that manipulating the individual segments directly, somehow bypasses the physics calculations.  

I actually managed to rig my model with configurable joints and make the joints stable ( no jitter ).  The biggest gotcha that I found is to make sure that the colliders that are attached to the rigid bodies do not intersect.  If they do then there will be joint instability (jitter).

Now that I have the joints working and the slip problem solved, it is on to finish the simulation.  I have a basic walk almost finished, still needs some tweaking.

I will post some screenshots when I can