My long term plays are generally SN short vols, short price. Flattening deltas is unavoidable. Dynamic hedging is not position repair. Getting short 30K vols and short 2K deltas is the structure you chose at the outset. It's called self preservation. It's the clowns that only short puts or roll passive positions for loss avoidance that are a stain on the industry.
In the Black-Scholes model with GBM, an option can be replicated exactly by delta-hedging the option. In fact the Black-Scholes PDE we derived earlier was obtained by a delta-hedging / replication argument.
I'm gonna try explain how it works. Think of classic arbitrage: you buy a stock with $10 on some exchange and at the same time sell it with $15 on another exchange. You make $5 risk-free. Conversely you may short a stock for $15 and buy it simultanously from elsewhere at a price of $10. This is exactly how delta-hedging works. We're talking two instances of the same product here: 1) The real option that you buy or sell on the options market. 2) A "virtual", exactly-the-same price and characteristics option that "replicates", "clones", however you wanna call it, "emulates" #1. So two cases: a) The bid price for the option on the real exchange is $15, hence you can sell it for $15 but the "theoretical fair value" (average price) you would get through delta-hedging for the same options is $10. In this case you sell the real option for $15 and start constructing a virtual portfolio which by all practical purposes behaves as if you would have bought the very same option. You "delta-hedge", meaning you sell and buy stock in various quantity throughout the life of the option and magically, at the end the virtual portfolio will have cost you on average only $10. So you capitalized on an arbitrage: sold the real option for $15 and "bought it" for $10, leaving you with $5 - ON AVERAGE! b) The ask price for the option on the real exchange is $10, hence you can buy it for $10 but the "theoretical fair value" (average price) you would get through delta-hedging for the same options is $15. In this case you buy the real option for $10 and start constructing a virtual portfolio which by all practical purposes behaves as if you would have sold the very same option. You "delta-hedge", meaning you buy and sell stock in various quantity throughout the life of the option and magically, at the end the virtual portfolio will have made you an average $15. So you capitalized on an arbitrage: bought the real option for $10 and "sold it" for $15, leaving you with $5 - ON AVERAGE!