Maybe running such an old kernel is a bad idea

New releases will also accidentally introduce completely new security problems, cause regressions, etc. I'd say that's about as likely as accidentally fixing some existing bug, if not more likely. So no advantage here.

I'm sure this argument has been repeated ad nauseam by now, I'm just too lazy to see if there is any actual research data to back up one of the views... Eh, still too lazy. Let's just leave it at empirical "if I look at what big dawgs are running, ie. Fedora or RHEL/CentOS/SL, that alone should count for something"...