I'm not sure if it's a lot of people or a couple of really loud people, but i've noticed some dogmatism towards active management on this board, though certainly not at the level of Bogleheads, but it's getting there.
I have to disagree with those who will just categorically reject active management. There's a lot of garbage out there to be sure, and the argument is usually that most actively managed funds have not survived, but how many of those had low management costs e.g. those at Vanguard?
Wellington Management and PRIMECAP Management are two firms in particular who have been vetted by Vanguard for a long time. In some cases, these funds have the same expense ratio as a LifeStrategy or Target Date Fund. Unfortunately, you can't go back in time and invest, but are we really going to discount the success of these types of funds to "they got lucky" ? Someone who went all in with Vanguard Health Care Fund, managed by Wellington, back in 1984 would have been rewarded quite well today.
If I want to invest in dividend stocks and corporate bonds, I can try to manage my own indexes, or I can just pay Wellington to do it for me. I don't think that Wellington is a terrible fund choice, but I do think that paying Wellington to micromanage your portfolio via Wellington Fund is a whole lot cheaper in the long run than paying some financial advisor to put you in various index funds...I could be wrong.
I think that for an institution, indexing is a no brainer - because of the sheer volume of capital inflow, but for the individual investor, I think they would be wise to consider some of the Vanguard active offerings rather than be dogmatic towards them because "active is bad".