Hi,
Good, I am glad you are moving forward and optimizing things around. It is tricky to fully grasp all the various context in which debugging gives you false alarm or misleading informations.
When I debug and profile in editor, I have a special layout which is just the game view and the profiler, nothing else, that's the closest to a clean profiling you can get in editor I think. Even the Unity Inspector is a big issue, all the inspectors that never make it in the final builds are taking performances away, and can mislead on conclusions.
Bye,
Jean