Why is copy/mirror/social trading avoided? Any thoughts?

I see lots of folk struggling to make a crust trading in the retail FX industry, struggling for years to take anything out of the market. Anyhow, I recently came across a guy who, rather than put effort into: learning how to trade, learning how to code MQL4, backtesting, forward testing, various strats for years, whilst holding down a full time job etc, had developed an algo to scrape info. from many leading copy sites, to then spread his risk across several of the board leaders, or traders wth exceptional returns versus risk/drawdown.

He also correlated it with other software he’d developed; which scrapes information and takes sentiment readings from social media ‘sites’ (Twitter, Facebook) and sentiment readings from trading forums. He reckons he was making an ok return, 35% p.a. on a six figure account.

Got me thinking as to why why so many guys here persevere with the torture of trying to learn how to trade (whatever that means in the retail market place) and don’t just copy the board leaders? Now obviously I’d be looking for guys who have negligible drawdowns, risk a small percentage of their account per trade, aim for realistic returns etc. but there’s many ways of you guys balancing your exposure.

I also began to think of the next generation of short attention span retail traders, let’s call them the App generation, surely they’re not going to go through the pains of learning how to trade, spend thousand of hours staring at charts? Look at how they’ve speculated on BTC etc.

Now I've read various opinions that e-toro, Zulu, Collective2 etc are not what they seem, “you get ripped off for spreads when you copy trade into their service, the sites are chokka full of fraudsters desperate to get to the top of the greasy pole by whatever means, the drawdowns are eye watering, there’s several Asian guys who have hundreds of profiles, running hundreds of strats on there”, etc, etc,

Be interested in any opinion, not an area I’ve paid much attention to. TIA.

About a year or so ago I noticed there is an option in MT5 where you can basically copy the trades of another trader.

I think this link shows some stats of various traders you can subscribe to:
https://www.mql5.com/en/signals/mt5/page1

I've been planning to look into this more, but it seems like something that a lot of people would want to do as an easy way to make some money.

Has anyone tried this?

I think one of the barriers to overcome and objections to copy trading is ego, so many punters on here have this vision that they’ll eventually crack some sort of code and become successful, but by the time they develop any kind of consistency they run out of money and even during the interim they’re generally only playing with buttons in their accounts. The game is all about making money, and the majority of punters on here are part time and will never have the time to learn how to trade and make money. It takes close to a decade (as an outsider) before the light will go on.

I think there’s too many folk not checked by these copy sites, their leaders should be thoroughly vetted, before allowing them to throw up their strats on copy sites. Looking at the MT5 site it’s the same; full of guys who want to charge 30 dollars a month to follow strats with drawdowns of 30%+, they’re generally just versions of martingale cobbled together by gambling idiots. But if you screen out the idiots, as this guy I know has, it may be a better route for many to follow, it’d be the death knell of forums like this though, but in any event manual/retail trading will be dead inside the next ten years.