My experience has been you can do a little better, if you put the time and effort into it. As they say, YMMV.
Your experience is, unfortunately, pretty worthless to everyone else. To understand why consider this old stock scam— I start with a list of 100,000 potential investors. Every week I fax each of them a flier for my investment service promoting a randomly selected stock as BUY BUY BUY. Then I throw out all the names that got bad advice from me as I go. After a few months I have a list of 50 people who I've consistently given amazing stock advice to, people who think I'm some kind of stock selecting god because my advice would have given 1000% returns if they followed it. Then I call them up and get them to invest in some crazy thing that will benefit me and I take their life savings. But before the end, in the
experience of those 50 people, I gave better returns... and their experience is correct, but my technique was pure random any my results were not good _on average_.
The same kind of pattern happens with mutual funds and other active investment options. There are many many thousands of them running at any time, and some of them will do better than the market. When people apply the statistical correction for multiple comparisons they find that most of the performance relative to indexes is not outside of what you'd expect to happen from chance. ... and sure, there is a possibility of excess returns, but even when that potential is real you have to balance the risk that they won't materialize against the absolute certainty of the fees.
As far as the original question goes— unless there is no chance otherwise that you'll get the 2013 roth within 2k of the limit, it should probably go in the roth, otherwise pay off the student loan. The limited annual IRA contributions are a precious thing and you should not let them pass unused.
Independent of whatever is done with the loan, your investment accounts should be moved someplace with low ERs and fees.