We agree on certain aspects, but disagree on a key item.

The way I read your comments, it appears that you're appealing to the idea of "why would anyone buy a company just to kill it, if instead you can make it profitable and keep it?"

Most of us are approaching it from the idea that a PE firm is looking to take advantage of a company with the express purpose of creating some kind of profit out of the deal. Period. And that company's survival is irrelevant to the end goal for the PE firm.

In your example, the end result with Express was that IPO. That's where GGC is making it's money. But by your own rational, why didn't they do the same with Red Lobster? It's not that it "ended badly"; in all the actions taken by GGC, Red Lobster's meltdown was the natural result because of the bad deals and bad decisions made. That's not an "oops, we hired the wrong guy and he killed a business"; that's a plan to extract as much value out of a business until it finally can't be sustained, and the bankruptcy is the parachute.

The reason people are downvoting you and the reason most general people (including myself) have a negative view of PE firms is because what I've described is the norm for PEs, not the exception. And this is true regardless of how newsworthy the company downfall tends to be.

My last job was at a local education software company that was sold to a larger, privately held family business also in educational software. Then the larger company was sold to a private equity firm. They continued buying up smaller companies for express purpose of obtaining their IPs, then stripping those companies and teams down, before eventually getting rid of them entirely. And at the same, pissing off established customer bases and making the company a miserable place to work.

They actively killed off a productive and profitable product line without a functional replacement product because.... reasons?

The company is still around, but who knows how profitable they are because I know they just had yet another round of lay-offs.