Why am I against it? Because it technically does not make any sense and causes a lot of work. Have you never checked what kernel RHEL or Debian are running on? IPFire is not doing anything differently here.
The kernel is not old. In the development tree is usually a kernel that is not older than a week since its release. They are all starting with 4.14 currently: git.ipfire.org Git - thirdparty/kernel/stable.git/shortlog
Good luck with that. And indeed thank you for the tone of your message.
What is frustratingly old?
In a business it does.