That seems unavoidable. It's the same in most industries. You have to pay top baseball players high salaries, even though there's no guarantee they'll do well after you hire them.
To cook up such a strategy purposefully is a crime
Is it, actually?
But the degree matters. If looting and destruction is occasionally rewarded, it can be a manageable expense. If it dominates the industry, even if not via conscious malice, we've got problems. What if every high-paid 'top baseball player' for 10 seasons running was a bust? Then something in scouting or compensation would have to change, a lot.
Is it [a crime], actually?
Yes. A manager who promises investors the possibility of positive return, but knows he has purposefully designed things so that the investors are guaranteed to ultimately lose, while the manager gains, has at the very least engaged in criminal fraud.
So to pull off net-losing strategies within the law, a manager should deceive himself as well as his investors. Fortunately for this class of managers, a whole industry of external rationalizations was spawned by the potential profits.
But the value of baseball comes from entertaining, not from winning, so I'd rather put it this way:
There would be something very wrong if you would suddenly realize that every game you saw in the last ten years had unconsciously bored you to death.
I don't think the case of day trading is covered by the baseball player analogy.