Killing Programs Softly

Seven months ago I asked the following question on StackExchange:

Sometimes, when I have many applications open doing many memory and IO-intensive things, my computer inevitably starts to thrash a bit. While waiting for things to settle down, I often decide to close some applications that don’t really need to be open. The trouble is that many of the applications (especially ones that have background/idle processes) tend to be intermittently unresponsive until the thrashing subsides, so it either takes a very long time for them to get focus to send ⌘+q, or when I go to close them by clicking on their icon in the dock I am only presented with the option to force quit. I know that those applications aren’t permanently unresponsive, so I’d prefer to send them a gentle TERM signal and have them quit gracefully when they are able. I usually end up killing them by using pkill from the terminal, however, that’s not always feasible, especially if the terminal is also hosed.

What is the easiest way to gently send the signal to kill a process if/when that process is intermittently unresponsive? (In a situation in which access to the terminal and/or starting a new application is not convenient.)

The question didn’t get much fanfare on StackExchange, and the only answer so far has been to use AppleScript to essentially programmatically send the ⌘+q signal to the application. I’ll bet it’s basically equivalent to using pkill from the terminal to send a SIGTERM to the process, but it might work in the event that my terminal emulator app is also unresponsive. Anyhow, it was the best solution I had, so I matured the idea by making a friendly standalone AppleScript that enumerates all of the currently running processes and prompts the users for which to gently kill. Here it is:

local procnames
tell application "System Events"
	set procnames to (get the name of every process whose background only is false and name is not "GentleKill")
end tell
(choose from list procnames with prompt "Which applications would you like to gently kill?" with multiple selections allowed)
if result is not false then
	set tokill to result
	set text item delimiters to {", "}
	display dialog "Are you sure you want to gently kill " & tokill & "?"
	repeat with prog in tokill
		tell application prog to quit
	end repeat
end if