[SwellJoe]

I don't get why this would be a positive thing for Red Hat's customers (or Red Hat, since stability/predictability is what Red Hat customers are paying for). There is a Red Hat-maintained Linux that is very close to upstream (Fedora). But the people who pay for RHEL don't want upstream and surprises, they want predictable for seven years and they're willing to pay a lot of money for that. Why would that be a negative for you or me? RHEL isn't breaking upstream with this practice, even if they are making mistakes in their own backports.

"edit: also stop incorrectly backporting security fixes and creating new CVEs. Seriously. Stop it."

Can you give some examples of cases where Red Hat introduced bugs in their backported patches? I follow RHEL CVEs relatively closely (because some of my packages are derived from their packages), and I can't think of an example of that happening. Debian has done so, but very rarely, that I can recall. (And, Ubuntu, too, since they just copy Debian for huge swaths of the OS.)