Ping and:
From what I have seen in a non rigorous analysis but merely observation, what ETFs lack in management “advantage” is easily made up for in fees paid to mutual fund management. Ditto for financial managers. That is considering sane portfolio management as a long term investment and not a trading account.
Wall Street and money management are mostly just a scam to skim 1% of assets or more off the top of your hard earned savings each year.
I moved out of mutual funds to index ETFs over time after researching their advantages. The biggest advantage is that if the market goes down significantly both mutual funds and ETFs would likely have to sell assets to cover redemptions. With mutual funds this would result in huge capital gains taxes on the stocks sold which would be passed on to the fund holders that year. So not only does your investment go down but you get hit with a big capital gains bill to boot. With ETFs they can raise assets by selling stocks without affecting the number of ETF shares thus avoiding a big tax bill for the ETF holders.