Saying I prefer investing in broad index funds to tilting towards tilting my index funds holdings value (or size, or momentum, or quality) is perfectly defensible.
Saying the following is just utter nonsense.
Value investing is crap. Utter crap, meant to sell people who don't know any better on a more expensive fund that "beats the market".
Value funds do not cost more because of slick marketing or sales angles, (Is Vanguard shady in its marketing of it's style funds? Is the style fund side of their business separated from the ethical broad index fund side?) they cost more because they are not cap weighted and require periodic trading (ie. transaction costs.)
Saying that "value investing is crap" is to posit that the capital asset pricing model is correct, which has been debunked for what 30 years? In such a fantasy world the momentum, value, quality, and size effects don't exist, despite the fact that they have been demonstrated time and time again in out of sample and out of market analyses.
Suggesting that Fama who first codified the 3 factor model would agree with your idiotic statement despite the fact that he,
A. won a Nobel for a model that used the value factor to explain excess returns over the CAPM,
and
B. Helped design the first passive value funds for DFA and still works for them
is completely ridiculous.
Furthermore simple real world back testing of gives empiric proof that value has had demonstrable value after fees to date.
VFINX vs DFLVX (US large cap vs US LCV) finds that DFLVX has a higher CAGR (10.46 vs 9.33) and a higher Sharp ratio (.50 vs .49).
Even more convincing is Small cap (VSMAX vs small value (DFSMX) DFSVX wins in both CAGR (11.82 vs 9.08) and Sharp ratio (.56 vs .46)
Finally Foreign large cap value (DFIVX) shows consistency with the above value dominance over Foreign large(VTMGX). CaGR (5.76 vs 2.58) Sharp (0.29 vs 0.13)
each back test uses the maximum timeframe allowed for the longest available passive vs blend funds.
Again these results are all after fees!
So the original statement could not be more transparently false.
In fact the original argument was so patently absurd that I feel like I just wasted 15 minutes arguing that the moon is not made of cheese. It was an easy but pointless exercise.