RH ships older kernels because they release relatively infrequently, and they've had time to QA them (the RH kernel test suite is huge and they run considerable stress tests). They backport features and drivers and fixes because their customers want the stability of well QA'd kernels and the support of newer server hardware and the benefits of fixes made later. One of the older RHELs even went so far as to backport entire subsystems from 2.6 into a 2.4 kernel because they felt overall 2.6 stability was insufficient for their needs.
Specific grips with your assertions aside, I think you are too quick to dismiss the ideological goals of FOSS projects - the entire FOSS ecosystem is afterall founded on some pretty seriously ideological goals, particularly Free Software. Open Source exists to dampen these goals and I suspect that a lot of folks now involved in this world are just interested in forking ruby software from github to run on their Mac ;)
Disclaimers: I own a Mac, but Linux has been my desktop/server OS of choice for the last decade, and I work as a sysadmin for a Linux distro company. I also write some software that's packaged in most of the distros now, so I feel self-entitled to see this from several very relevant perspectives ;)
Specific grips with your assertions aside, I think you are too quick to dismiss the ideological goals of FOSS projects - the entire FOSS ecosystem is afterall founded on some pretty seriously ideological goals, particularly Free Software. Open Source exists to dampen these goals and I suspect that a lot of folks now involved in this world are just interested in forking ruby software from github to run on their Mac ;)
Disclaimers: I own a Mac, but Linux has been my desktop/server OS of choice for the last decade, and I work as a sysadmin for a Linux distro company. I also write some software that's packaged in most of the distros now, so I feel self-entitled to see this from several very relevant perspectives ;)