Wow, that's so unfortunate, reacting with hostility and defensiveness when instead you could be listening and learning from Surf, who's an experienced pro at hedgefund manager selection and cap intro.
Tough neighborhood. Hedge funds and managed money have their place for an allocation for someone that does not want to just be long SPY or pick stocks themselves. As to if they are worth 2/20, I don't care about fees. I care about risk adjusted, tax adjusted returns after fees. And, how much work they needed to do to get to that. If they actively trade, they are worth higher fees. If they look at their positions once a quarter, I'm not paying 2/20 for that.
The fact is those actively trade doesn't mean they will bring back higher return, indeed, it is always the other way around.
I have no empirical evidence that says that active trading is better or worse than "investing", as a general statement. I have noticed that the actively traded funds seem to do better. It might be their strategies, not their time frame.
People like to use hedge fund more now, because it seems they have better structure and expect higher return. It really depends on the manager of the hedge fund, they vary alot. I know some individual traders do better than hedge fund. Some times the fund is too big, it is the same as index. Plenty of time that people chase fund that went up, and sell when it is going down. pretty same logic as normal people trading their own money in real market.