Exactly. I experimented with options some time ago. My conclusion was that they're not good for profiting from long term growth. Sometimes the company may be improving in terms of fundamentals but its stock price could be flat or even going down for an entire year.
You would be wasting a lot of money on premiums as your options expire worthless for several quarters in a row.
Options require one to have detailed, short term information about the company and one needs to be able to predict the outcome of specific financial reports - This is almost impossible to do unless you spend a lot of time studying the company's operations in detail.
I find shares superior if you just want to invest in fundamentals; you rely more on your reasoning skills to try to figure out if those fundamentals will lead to more profits down the line.
Buying and holding shares isn't as data-driven as doing so with options. With options, you're competing against AI trading algorithms which have massive amounts of data.
