Does the kernel scheduler even matter???

The scheduler could still help more under conditions of VM stress. For example, on my netbook, which thrashes when you run firefox + anything, I literally run killall -STOP firefox-bin; killall -CONT other-app when I want to switch between them. This is a lot more convenient than quitting and restarting each app, which otherwise I would have to do. I imagine there might be some less manual way to achieve the same thing by building some more smarts into the scheduler/VM to achieve the same effect. Possibly with help from userspace.