Is there anywhere I can access 10.1 repositories? If not, I’m left with just downloading individual RPMs?
No official support for this remains.
So “official” support ends 2 years after the version is released?
Pretty well all support because the volunteers who support lots of the software have moved on.
If you want long term support, go for the enterprise version and pay for the lowest cost support contract. Then you can get it for five years.
Otherwise, make sure you upgrade every two years or go for something like Gentoo or Arch Linux.
Developer resources are finite and priority has to be given to supported releases. Also it gets harder and harder to patch bugs in older software. For example: Say a severe bug is found in BIND (this actually did happen a while back). The upstream will only patch the latest series. So what the maintainer has to do is to propagate the gist of the fix to the older source code. This may be fairly straightforward if there are no conflicts with other changes, or may consume time to study the code to craft an appropriate backport. For this kind of service you pay Novell to maintain the enterprise series for 5 years. In extreme cases it may be impossible to backport a fix. For example, at one point RHEL decided they could no longer support Firefox 1.5 and installed Firefox 2.x in its place. This was deemed acceptable because usually a browser is used by the end user and normally not a long-running service.