Thank you very much for the detailed response Andrew. Like you, I appreciate input from others, at least as much of not more when they take a reasoned opposing view, as you do here.

Responding to your comment about the funds not being comparable, I beg to differ at least somewhat. Not as to the truth of what you say, but as to its relevance.

The whole idea of choosing actively managed funds is not to recreate the index! It's to find a somewhat diversified way of beating it! And that's exactly what the TRP funds did for each of the 5-year periods.

As for the difference over time, yes, that's true. However, that reduction is minute. Over the past 5 years, the annualized over-performance of the 8 active TRP funds was 7.7%/year, reducing to 6.7%/year over a 10-year period, and going down even more minutely to 6.3%/year when looking at the last 15 years.

This means that had you invested $10k in an equally weighted baskt of the dozen Vanguard index funds 15 years ago, you'd now have about $30k - not bad. Had you invested it in an equally weighted basket of the 8 TRP funds at the same time instead, you'd have $77k, 2.5x more!