Comment by SimplyUnknown

I have the feeling that B-splines would be a good solution for this problem. Given that they have a continuous zeroth (i.e., the function is continuous), first, and second derivative, the motion will always be smooth and there will be no kinks. However, maybe it's moving the problem because now you must tune the coefficients of the B-spline instead of damping parameters (even though a direct mapping between these must exist but this mapping may not be trivial).