That is exactly what I am saying!
Easy test. Start up the phone and run some apps for a while. If the OS is running properly, they will end up above the OS in the list. After you stop using the apps, let the phone sit idle for a while. The OS should gradually climb towards the top again. It should not jump right back up to the top immediately.
I had to edit this because I re-read your post and saw: "...but as apps are turned on or used, then the processor basically forgets about OS and focuses on the app or apps turned on"
No.. .the OS is never forgotten. It is the one thing that absolutely must run all the time. There is an application, process, or service associated with every little thing that your phone does. Many of them are actually a part of the OS, and the rest are associated with apps you have installed, or hardware that is unique to the device that it is running on. When apps are started, they become a process. That process might launch additional processes to do some background work, or activate system services that will allow it to interface with specific pieces of HW in your phone. You can see these under manage apps as "running" or "cached" processes. Cached processes are loaded in memory, but not actively being used. This allows them to start very quickly when needed because the OS does not need to load them into memory and create "contexts" for them. To understand a context, you need to remember that a CPU core can only run 1 process at any point in time. How can the phone do so many things at once? Easy, it runs some of each process or service for a little bit of time (called a time slice) in rapid succession. Kinda like those little books that show a movie when you flip the pages. Each page is a still image, but by giving each page a brief slice of time in rapid succession, we see a movng image. Same concept. The OS controls task scheduling. Every process that needs to run gets a context. The context contains a chunk of memory, which holds the program code, any data that the program uses, as well as a copy of the CPU core's registers. To make everything run, the OS makes a list of contexts, and simply jumps from one to another doing a little bit of work on each one. To us, it is all happening at the same time. On a 2 core CPU, the OS will manage 2 task lists, and all of the contexts associated with the processes running on each core. The OS is working its ass off all the time. If you are not running any apps, the OS is still bouncing around running all of the processes that do the basic stuff, but there are lots of empty time slices between the ones that the OS uses for itself. As you run apps, the OS simply does more stuff by filling in the empty time slices with processes.
Does that make better sense?
ut2 was my culprit keeping the phone awake. Believe me I know how frustrating this can be! Took me weeks of trying to figure out what was using the battery on mine. I know nothing about rooting so I am of no help there.