You have a valid point on old hardware. I tried to install CentOS 4 on a Pentium I/120 with 32 megs of RAM. CentOS 4 croaked. However, Redhat 6.2 works perfectly fine on that box, and that box is used as a Samba file/print server with 4 printers attached. It seems that the 2.6.x kernels need at least 128mb of RAM to run reliably, while the 2.2.x kernels run happily 24x7x365 with 32mb of RAM.

"...Pull up your average PHP/.Net/Java SQL tutorial and odds are that it will be concatenating strings..."

That and I run into programmers who have over ten years working in the field who absolutely refuse to work with databases any other way. They freak out when you tell them data access is via parameterized stored procedures.