What was one recent example?

System Apache unable to listen on non-standard port.

Not possible.

Tell me of a vulnerability on a fully-updated RHEL 6 image running only SSH and a basic Apache configuration serving static files which would be prevented by the stock SELinux configuration.

You mean labels? No, that's pretty fundamental to SELinux.

Exactly. So my explicit decisions about file permissions must be duplicated. No thanks.

Try setroubleshoot.

So, no.