Re: stability and QA, couldn't agree more. I only briefly used Ubuntu LTS in production back in '10 and it wasn't a fun experience. I'm sure it has improved but RHEL/CentOS (almost) never lets me down in that regard.
0 - https://www.cisecurity.org/advisory/multiple-vulnerabilities...
Source repo: https://github.com/iuscommunity-pkg/php71u
For security reasons, I'm directly building the packages from Git. Works like a charm, and I don't have to include many different third party repos or introduce additional security dependencies.
Generally, Red Hat backports security fixes without incrementing the version number (though that doesn't seem to be the case here).
While generally all LTS distros are quite good these days, I've found that, unsurprisingly, features that are developed heavily or owned by a single distro end up being rocky. RHEL has a lot of things that are not as heavily used elsewhere, and they are far from production quality. For eg., their lvm thin provisioning feature, is pretty rough, and had some very obvious failure cases that could even lead to data loss. I'm guessing that no one uses thinp in production.
There's a whole book-sized section about in the storage docs.
The docker-storage-setup utility, for example, sets it up correctly and enables automatic extension.
We switched to overlayfs and never looked back.