RHEL works by backporting bug fixes and new features into the old versions. Don't go by the version numbers, check the availability of features instead.
Backporting features and not bumping versions is redicilous though, especially when that means v3.1 of upstream is different to v3.1 in your repo.
You're just not their target audience. Others are willing to throw money at Red Hat for this "rediculousness", though.
RHT's market cap is over $20 billion today so that says it's providing real value to customers.
At my new job, we recently had that debate -- and I was quickly overruled for recommending CentOS/RHEL. My employer is a Java shop, I can almost always find rpm and deb pkg's for most stuff we need.