General Questions

Grüezi mitenand us Dänemark.  Ändli chom ech emou dezue es riisigs Merci z'säge.

To the question:  Often, you would apply an (n-1) strategy, keeping your support level reasonably up to date without being on the bleeding edge. 

I'm currently running 1.3b18, built on Sun Aug 16 22:39:03 CEST 2009, on a Soekris net4801.  It's rock stable, and even a couple of sudden loss of power this summer haven't been able to kill it.  Neither have a couple of DoS attacs last winter.

Would there be any reasonable reasons for me to go through the pain of upgrading?  Pros & cons?

/Per Hertz

Any time you're upgrading, really depends on what changed and whether it's applicable to your specific config/deployment. If any bug fixes or security updates in subsequent releases impact you, or you need some new functionality that's added, upgrade. If not, then there isn't any requirement to upgrade generally.