This is key. Finance companies love playing bait-and-switch games once they have your assets and build up sufficient friction to keep you from moving to greener

This is key. Finance companies love playing bait-and-switch games once they have your assets and build up sufficient friction to keep you from moving to greener pastures when they decide to reign in profitability again. ERs are a pure marketing gimmick once you get down to early 2000s-era Vanguard fees. Beyond that the devil is in the details with how incentives are aligned for those managing, including security lending practices which can either juice returns to completely offset those minimal fees or buy those yachts that the clients never seem to have, and especially for index funds you have tracking error which adds several basis points for/against you depending on manager competence in accurately sampling the index while minimizing several forms of risk, latency/frequency in updating positions that are a discrete approximation of continuous compounding, and the hugely overlooked problem that large institutional investors have to use complicated derivative orders, exchange dark pool agreements, swaps, and other methods of obscuring huge pool transactions where HFT will gnaw away at basis points here and there knowing that those large blocks of shares must be rebalanced at specific times to meet predetermined liquidity demands. Don't misunderestimate the activeness of passive index funds. :)