Then why does subsequently opening the application bypass splash screens and menus?
Owned.
I'm not sure why I'm bothering to respond, given the mentality I usually associated with the "owned" meme (at least it was "pwned" ...) but it's worth noting that the operating system goes out of its way to hide the details of what's really going on.
If by "open" you mean getting CPU time, eating up battery life, actively performing tasks, etc. then applications that aren't in the foreground
usually aren't "open." Most applications are completely suspended when they're in the background - they're resident in memory but that's it (and they're supposed to aggressively reduce their memory usage before being suspended.) There are obvious exceptions for applications playing background audio, navigation, and so forth, but very few applications fall into this category.
So if by "open" you mean the application is still in memory? Maybe. A foreground application that needs a lot of memory will reclaim memory used by suspended applications. So there are indeed instances when an application that has been suspended will launch from scratch and you'll see the splash screen again. Just because it shows up in the "tray" of recently used applications doesn't mean it's tying up memory.
Again, free memory is wasted memory. Until you need it for something else there's
no reason not to keep something in it that might speeds up future operations. I hate to break it to you, but
every modern operating system executable uses available memory as a disk cache so that re-launching an application you've just exited is faster. Quitting an app in Windows or OS X doesn't "get rid of it", either. iOS just goes the next step and allows the app to pick up from where it left off if the memory isn't needed for anything else.
As for your signature?
Steve Jobs - Idiot of the year | I have yet to hear one Apple apologist explain why the idiot above holds the iPhone 4 in the exact same way he says not to.
He pretty clearly told people not to hold it
in a way that causes reception problems. When you're not having reception problems you can hold it any way you please! It's like nobody here ever owned a cell phone before. Or a radio. Or anything else that relies on wireless communication subject to RF interference.