Another 1020 update.
Decided to once again do a hard reset, after it was complete I didn't setup Cortana and initially didn't have location services running, disabled some apps from running in the background. This time around everything is running with what I would consider about par with 8.1 on the battery utilization, also the issue of "System" using a lot of data no longer occurring. However, I am once again not getting notified of SMS messages which the hard reset fixed before this last one fixed. So at this point I don't know what the issue was and I suspect I may have to do yet another hard reset to fix my SMS issue, I'm hesitant though since at the moment my battery is working fine.
Tomorrow I might enable Cortana and see if things remain consistent.