It's a bit of a personal preference how close to the bleeding edge you want or need to be. For me, I generally don't upgrade until there is some reason to do so, and not until there has been at least one service pack released to fix all the major bugs in version 0. Nothing worse than upgrading only to find you need to revert for some piece of broken crucial functionality.
You've identified well-established tasks that would probably be safe at any version since 9.x (and some would say well before that), so those requirements don't need to play a pivotal role in your decision.
Something you may want to consider is backwards compatability within or outside your organization. Higher versions can open previous versions' geodatabases, but not the other way around, without the former saving to the latter's version. It doesn't need to be a showstopper, just an extra annoyance if you have, say, 10.3 and are often sharing (or trying to replicate) data with a slow-moving organization like, say, government who are still at 10.0.
I'll add, I'm comfortably at 10.2.2 and I will stay here until I have a reason to upgrade.