Not sure if that applies to your line of work but RHEL has been an increasingly annoying source of issues in low-latency space. Their kernels are a bizarre mixture of cherry picked stuff from upstream and a completely bonkers project structure. Also, they break ABI across minor kernel versions which is unthinkable in mainline. What I'm trying to say is: if you're doing more funky stuff with your OS, just go with a distro built on top of mainline.