Cavalary: Hmm... Stability, basically not having major changes, and more assurances that things are tried and true and long tested was what made me look into Mint... Any newer stuff or any hint of a faster pace of updates makes the prospect of switching, which I of course keep putting off even really making plans for attempting, even scarier.
Understandable. According to Mint, they went with the Ubuntu LTS Kernel for the very reason, that it is more stable and better testet. Yet in recent years, the HWE-Kernels have allegedly improved on that front and come with the benefit of supporting more up to date hardware as demonstrated above. For an OS that aims to work "out of the box" that is a considerable advantage. You will, of course, still be able to keep to older kernel if you wish to. On an older machine that is perfectly fine IMHO.