I like all my performance gauges I have monitoring my system to be showing very little resource use as possible to keep my machine at its best..
That simply doesn't make sense. It's a psychological barrier you have to get over. Why have all that power available if you're not going to use it? Why do you equate no programs running and no resources being used with running at it's best. You do realize that servers run 24 hours per day sometimes at full capacity. It's a computer, that's what it's designed to do.
If an app (whether on Android or Windows) isn't doing anything, it's not going to consume CPU time anyway, so it's not hurting anything, it just sits in RAM. I think people get confused with CPU resources and RAM use. RAM is there to be used. The more stuff that sits in RAM, the faster your computer can open apps and work, until you hit the limit and it has to swap out the page file, then that's a different story. It's the CPU resources consumed that gets you in trouble. If you're railing your CPU to 100%, that's when you have to sit and wait for it to free up before you computer will start responding again. But an app just sitting in RAM not doing anything isn't going to do any harm. The only thing a task killer does is remove it from RAM, which is just going to filled up when the app starts again. And if it doesn't start again, then you have more free RAM for.......well nothing. Why does that make things faster? If the RAM is sitting there with nothing in it, why not fill it with something, especially if that something is an app that you use often. If it's an app that you don't use often, Android will kill it eventually anyway.
I'm not saying it's a perfect system, and the Eris can be a pain sometimes. But computers are a different beast these days. They have so much power and resources available to them. You don't have to close all your apps and shut off the power every night like my in-laws still insist on doing. When you're done with your computer, just walk away. And with your phone, no need to close things down, just hit the power button and shove it in your pocket.