LOL obviously you have no idea what it means for an application to have data "cached". To enlighten you, it means that data from that application is being stored in memory. That, in turn, means that it is using that memory.
I am aware that the Android OS frees up memory on its own when necessary. That is not my point, but you seem to think that it is. You also seem to think that a particular application using memory is the same thing as the application running at full/normal capacity when you're actually using it. That is your mistake.
To clear this up for you, imagine the following hypothetical situation: Your phone's total memory is 500 MB. There are 0 MB free. You start an application that uses 4 MB. It works. That's because something else was killed (de-cached, if you will) in order to accommodate the newly-started application. You seem to think that 4 MB would be pulled from the sky, but that's just plain silly.
You do realize in the very quote you have, he specifically said having an app loaded in memory is not the same as it running?
You actually made HIS point.
just like you said, Memory is irrelevant to the question of a process "running". A process can actually be removed and not running, but still have a portion "cached" in memory. This cached memory does not affect your performance, because as you pointed out: If something else needs that memory, it just takes it away.
What DOES matter is cpu utilization. The "bloat" processes such as CityID, Amazon MP3, etc. are all simply cached, and idle. They have data cached into memory but are not actually doing anything. Thus, there is no reason to bother with killing these processes as they are behaving properly. Freeing up memory will only drain your battery a little more ( because you had to start a process and use a tiny bit of power to "kill" the process and clear the memory ) and also slows down your phone ( both because you had to load another process to do it, which temporarily used up some of your CPU cycles, as well as any time you might want to load that process it is no longer in memory and must fully load from scratch.)
NOTE: With the "bloat" apps, it's even worse because the app just auto-starts back up, thus you also did not even accomplish freeing up any memory. In fact, it is possible the apps needed to take memory from something else to fully start back up and get back to where they were.
Now, yes: This is all assuming the app is properly coded ( all of the "bloat" apps are behaving properly, at least on my phone. So this does not apply to them. ), so you may need to force close certain poorly coded apps. It happens.
