Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

This actually is pretty sad.

I used to work at Progeny, making customized RPM-based distributions derived from RHEL sources, and I actually found the RHEL kernels to be quite sane to work with and customize back then (this was 4+ years ago).

Kernel SRPMs used to contain basically stock kernels from kernel.org along with a large number of patches to be applied in a systematic way by the rpm build process. It still required a fair bit of esoteric knowledge and understanding to be able to grok the process, but it was possible and you could de-couple the patches and modify the kernels as needed (it was part of our bread-and-butter at the the time :-) The fact that they are now just a blob of patched work is pretty disheartening.

Part of me wonders if this is more laziness than anything else on behalf of the RHEL kernel maintainers, because creating the SRPM kernels that way is likely more difficult in the short term (but with the extra added benefit of maintainability in the long term). I can't imagine that this was a result of some serious debate internally as to how they could do some sort of "value add" to the product, or a "lock-in"... because it seems like it's just going to cause more headaches for the RHEL kernel maintainers than it's probably worth.