I was really slow on picking up Babel too. But I've been using Babel 5.x in production for six months without errors - main things were docs that referred to old versions of babel and babelify.

I needed to plug this in the package.json of my private modules:

    "browserify": {
        "transform": [
            "brfs",
            [
                "babelify",
                {
                    "presets": ["es2015"]
                }
            ]
        ]
    }

Node.js is moving pretty fast at this point, after the io.js merger. I can understand using Babel to provide a unified, modern language API for browser applications, as there are so few guarantees you can make about a client's browser, but there already is a single API target for server javascript for any given version of node. Unlike browser JS, you can guarantee that the server development environment and the production environment will execute on the same runtime. Meanwhile, I don't trust that every Babel implementation of an unstable language feature will match the final official implementation. If it did, someone would just merge babel's shims into node and call it a day.

That's not "grandpa". Babel's creator himself has said he cares little about new syntax. Node 4 or 5 is more than fine.

Node 4/5 (really arrow functions alone) largely eliminated the need for Babel on backend code IMO.