[chrisplough]

As far as patches, it depends. For standard patches to either EBS or OTM, it shouldn't make a difference to your integration at all -- though I'd always recommend testing in a dev, test or pre-prod environment.

However, when Oracle releases patches to the pre-packaged integration flows, and you've customized them, then you'll need to own the process of merging those changes into your customized flows. While I understand your desire to use only standard integration, to ease future maintenance -- I don't believe the integration flows are mature enough to allow that. I'm not aware of any client who's been able to use the integration flows without modification.

--Chris