[jsmthrowaway]

This is especially big for RHEL, OEL, and friends. Yeah, CentOS is cool for your startup but a big portion of the valley wants support contracts so they can stop doing OS grunt work, and if your provider doesn't roll RHEL you get to deploy your own, and AFAIK that is not possible on DO (and requires quite a bit of work on Linode, its closest competitor in the space; DO is not AMZN). Deploying RHEL in a supported way requires using their kernels.

It's your virtual machine. You should be able to pick a kernel. This isn't for running Andrew Morton patches, as some of the comments imply.