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It's certainly not true that a higher version number implies a Red Hat distro that's
superior in every respect. I've invariably experienced annoyances with every
upgrade.
Successive versions of Red Hat have, of course, more and more recent versions of
the kernel and all bundled software. Then there are the tools that Red Hat
writes specifically for its own distro, like its installers, and graphical tools to do
system administration.
As far as Red Hat's own tools are concerned I've found the hardware detection
has generally improved. I've found the constantly changing utilities and sys admin
tools a great nuissance. The applet used to do dial up has changed a few times,
in my opinion for the worse.
The gui sysadmin tools were more or less unusable in Red Hat versions up to 6.2.
I found that linuxconf would crash on average about once a minute. This was one
(among many) of the instances of remarkable incompetence and disrespect for users
that has been common in the Linux world. Fortunately, I found these tools had
improved to the point where they were passable in Red Hat 7.x.
For me, Red Hat 8.0 and 9.0 were big dissapointments. The biggest dissapointment
for me personally was Gnome 2.x. Now, Red Hat can't be held entirely accountable
for that, because Gnome is not a Red Hat project (though it contributes).
Nevertheless, the default Red Hat 9.0 setup has Gnome 2.x with a terrible theme
called "bluecurve," significantly reduced functionality, and a failure to carry over
preferences, yet there is no warning at all about any of this anywhere.
Gnome 2.x is a good example of the fact that software doesn't always improve with
successive versions. Gnome 1.4 was pretty bad, but Gnome 2.x is significantly worse.
Now, some of the underlying technology in Gnome 1.4 that was very limited or broken
was improved in Gnome 2. One hopes that that will bear fruit in future versions of
Gnome, but only time will tell.
Upshot: if Red Hat 7.2 is working for you, stick with it for now.
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