I'm not willing to cripple my Internet connect tablet to restore the battery performance it should have

You should be able to leave wifi on and still get good battery performance, like you can on an iPad. The root cause isn't wifi, it appears to be badly behaved apps. If I force all the apps running background stuff out of memory it will last far better.

Unfortunately I've never taken the time to work out which apps are at fault specifically and just killing everything is just as bad as turning off wifi. Which is one of the reasons my N7 goes unused.