I found one of the wart-hog components: softwareupdated (I think that's what it was named.) When the system memory started pigging out I first opened up Performance Probe (comes with Scannerz) and looked at the memory snapshot. softwareupdated is using almost 500MB of RAM while sitting there doing absolutely nothing. I disabled the check for backups automatically option, rebooted, and now it's functioning more like Yosemite or Mavericks memory wise (in other words, the huge amounts of memory being used are now gone).
...but it's still not as fast as Snow Leopard!
...but it's still not as fast as Snow Leopard!