Disappointing YUM behavior

I've been recently building RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 Servers. During these builds, I've come across many annoyances and some bugs, and some "undocumented features" which were unpleasant to say the least.

However, one of the most looked forward to features in my opinion was now having YUM available instead of up2date. YUM's dependency resolution is excellent to say the least! But having excellent dependency resolution does not mean it's perfect.

On May 27th, our RHN Satellite server downloaded all of the RHEL5.2 packages from Redhat. I now have servers, which due to EMC PowerPath, need to be on RHEL5.0 or RHEL5.1. We do not wish to use RHEL5.0 due to some very annoying bugs in it, so RHEL5.1 is my only real option. So, after loading a server with 5.0, when I do a yum update, it will load it out fully to RHEL5.2 since it is pulling against our Satellite server and that is the version currently advertised out.
I disagree with this, and find the lack of a "upgrade to release" option in YUM also to be disappointing. I would like to be able to issue one or a few commands, and have the server be fully updated to the latest/last packages for the particular update version, but not go past that. The larger reason for not going past that is because many programs use kernel modules, and once you upgrade the kernel, you generally have to take corrective steps for these programs to continue to work after the next boot.

Anyway, enough for now, I've got to think about this overnight. Later maybe I'll post some more architecture about my current server build, which is a two-node RHEL5 GFS2 Cluster.