The design of Android is not meant to be a discussion.
It's been explained.
If you want to hold onto backwards thinking, go ahead.
Android opens apps because that's how it's supposed to run. It will reclaim memory when it needs it.
Open Google, do some searching, the proof will STARE YOU IN THE FACES
And that's base don what Android THINKS is sufficient. We all know that when you dip to 30MB free or so even the home screen starts being choppy.
When I set my minfree to around 60, I see (using a task killer) that my phone does its best to keep around 60 MB free RAM. The result? Lightning fast response.
There's nothing wrong with using a task killer. You just gotta use it correctly. Setting it to auto kill every 5 min is NOT the solution you're absolutely right, but to generalize that task killers are not needed is outrageous. Even your own update shows that there are specific cases where it could be used.
Today I just pulled my phone out of my pocket. My phone was hot as hell. I remember closing slacker radio after I left the car (which is a daily routine), and the icon isn't there on the top. So why is it so hot? Why did my battery drop 40% since lunch? Hmmm. I had to use a task killer just to kill stuff to be sure. And sure enough the phone stopped draining. I'm not sure what the source was, but killing a bunch of unecessary apps seemed to do the trick.
If you really think Android's going to do this all perfectly for you, then this is like saying Apple makes the best decisions for its smartphone users and that you should never have to do something beyond the scope of the phone (i.e. forget rooting/jailbreaking).
As for the whole 100 MB myth... like you said its wasted real estate. But to whom? What if you have 2gb of memory but you want to maintain 100mb free. So what's wasting 5% of real estate going to do? To kill you? If you do it on a DROID, 100/256 is a lot, so yeah it's a huge waste. But is Android's typical 30mb or whatever sufficient? The system typically gets unresponsive at that point. Its a night and day difference between 30 MB and 60MB.
The page also makes some good points. You obviously don't wnat 100MB free at all times because your system will kill as much as it can. If the base system uses 150mb out of your 256mb, then you only have 6 more MB of free "your memory." Obviously this will lead to redraws and stuff. Apps being killed off all the time. Like having to reload all your webpages. But at the same time, how do you know Android's default 32mb works fine? What if 40 MB works better for you? 50MB? It's all experimentation.
To say that Google engineers nailed it perfectly on the dot is false. This is why with each OS update and with each phone specific update, performace gets better and better. There's tweaking to be done, and we can do some of it, but make sure you're doing it correctly.
