Yeah, I would often just grab htop because I had no idea how to read the CPU usage out of top.
For example, for me it says:

%Cpu(s):  0,4 us,  0,4 sy,  0,0 ni, 98,8 id,  0,0 wa,  0,3 hi,  0,0 si,  0,0 st

Now that I look at it, I can guess that us and sy are supposed to be user and system time. And I guess id is supposed to be idle.
I have no guess what the other numbers might be, though. And well, I would often like to see the CPU usage per core.
Now I know that I can just press 1t and get effectively the same view as in htop.

I might learn top's filtering workflow, too. But so far, I always killed processes with ps -ef | grep <process-name> and then kill <pid>, which isn't particularly more cumbersome, so will see...