Your instincts are quite good even though you do struggle with math.
Thermodynamics is a great tool since in principle, it depends on just two things; the density of states and the occupation of those states. In principle, thermo does not depend on the nature of the underlying action, gravity or charge. That is, until you you get into thermo's sibling, statistical mechanics.
In statistical mechanics, partition functions are key and depend on a precise counting of states that statistically ties to the generic entropy and free energy of thermo. This is where a quantum gravity like matter time is very useful because quantum gravity allows science to now precisely count the states of a black hole, ECO, or boson star and therefore make some sense out of those objects with the powerful thermo tools of this universe, a true gravity partition function.
"Keeping in mind that entropy is loss of working energy in a system, which conserved, is being radiated away. Since the function of a system is to create order, the result is a stabilized quantity of energy."
Just a few minor tweaks with this. Entropy is simply a metric that tells us about the absolute number of possible states, w, of a closed static system, S = kB ln(w). It is the change in entropy between two systems that tells us that all action necessarily results in increasing entropy or randomness--the famous arrow of time. Therefore it is the huge entropy increase of the gravitational partition function that fuels the entropy decrease and therefore increasing order of the charge force partition function and the arrow of time.
Generally speaking, energy conservation is a very useful principle for matter waves as mass. However, matter waves as amplitude and phase are mostly pure bosons and in a closed universe can dephase and lose coherence and apparently lose energy as well over time. This is actually the driving principle of the contracting matter time universe, with its decreasing states and increasing order pointing the arrow of time.
Think of injecting a pulse of coherent light into a sphere of perfectly reflecting walls. Even without energy losses, the pulse will still dephase over time with each successive reflection and slowly spread into a uniform average pulse energy of this hohlraum. To an outsider, the energy is conserved as a pulse with the wavelength of the hohlraum, but to an insider, the energy of the original pulse seems to simply vanish over time.
Now allow energy loss at the reflectors as well as gain, make them 2.7/1089 K, and put them in motion collapsing at 99.9998% c. Oui la, there is our universe. We are within 0.12% of the center of this collapsing hohlraum and the residual CMB light pulse hits us 160 billion times a second from all directions.
But each successive year there are actually mdot = 0.283 ppb/yr or 45 more pulses each year and that pulse pileup from the CMB and all matter that is what determines all force. Since this is only a change in atomic time of one second every 65 proper timeyears and an increase in c of 88 km/s/Mpc, science does not yet recognize that atomic time speeds up over the proper time pulse of the universe. Right now, our mass standard, the IPK, takes the full hit and so shows an apparent decay of 2 x 0.283/yr, which of course represents an anomaly that science has not yet resolved.
Eventually science will believe in their own measurements of the decay of matter over time, for that decay is the cornerstone of the matter time universe. This is going to take a while...In the meantime, the patchwork of the big bang will live on because it still remains a quite useful artifice. There is a strange symmetry that the findings that ostensibly support the big bang support matter time as well...at least so far. Since the big bang is so patched up, it is very likely that there will be more patches applied before the edifice of this artifice collapses.
