CentOS 5 / RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 not IPv6 ready

These days I am trying to start using IPv6 on CentOS 5, but unfortunately I found that this distro is not exactly ready to run IPv6. What is the main problem for me: The kernel version coming with the distro is not, I repeat it is NOT, capable of doing connection tracking, which is very very bad.
We are being brought back in the days of kernel 2.2 and ipchains.
Probably some of you remember how crippled it was, compared to 2.4 and 2.6 + iptables.

Well it looks like the users of RHEL 5 are screwed (at least for now) even though they are paying.
In this bug report,

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=243739

the RH developers basically say that backporting of xtables to kernel 2.6.18 is not possible, which sounds very bad for me. They can at least try to release a newer kernel version even though this is against the versioning policy accepted by RedHat, but you have to agree that this is too expensive distro and to not support IPv6.
They recommend building kernel from source with enabled IPv6 connection tracking features.
Come on guys what I am paying for, for building my custom kernels ?