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suppose there are some new updates to the RAID implementation and I end up screwing up my data. Maybe I just don't choose the right compile flags to ensure compatibility or something like that.

Nope. No need for the FUD. That cannot happen. To screw your data, you have to work much harder than that, and issue commands that do it on purpose, and bypass the warnings that most of them give you.

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Also what if I have a catastrophic hardware failure (fried motherboard or something) and have to rebuild everything. I KNOW that it is possible to rebuild everything to get the data off the drives, but maybe I'm not capable of doing it without making a mistake somewhere along the way.

Nothing to do with Linux there -- same issues regardless.

Backups are safer than RAID.

Cheers