Thank you for publishing this, Preston.
I will go much further than Jamie Ebersole does and say this: Private equity, as a general rule, has been a poor investment not just for "individual investors without experience" but also for the largest, supposedly most sophisticated institutional investors who spend millions of dollars on exactly the sort of due diligence that Jamie Ebersole describes.
CEM Benchmarking recently published an update to their analysis of actual investments by hundreds of large U.S. pension funds over the 18-year period 1998-2015. (My organization sponsored both the update and the original study, which can be downloaded at https://www.reit.com/data-research/research/updated-cem-benchmarking-st….) In the real world, the volatility-adjusted returns to private equity investing were no better than the volatility-adjusted returns to investing in large-cap public equities, and slightly lower than the volatility-adjusted returns to investing in small-cap public equities--and that doesn't take into account the much higher risk of illiquidity.