Kinda. A few points to help clarify things:
All funds that go into the business will either be debt or equity. Debt gets a guaranteed rate of return, and needs to be paid back. It gets first claim if you go under, but gets no "bonus" if you do well. Equity is an ownership stake; last in line if you go under, but with a claim on all future profits if you do well. The most obvious type of equity stake is your own, but you might say to a friend hey, go halves with me on buying a new lathe, and I'll split the profits from the furniture I make 50/50. That's another example of an equity stake, as old as the hills.
All a stock market is, is your friend saying "look, I've got the note saying I have a right to 50% of the profits of Zac's furniture business, but I'm broke right now; anyone wanna give me $50 for it?". And because in practice this sort of thing is fraught with risk, this is incredibly regulated, but that's all a stock market is; people trading the right to some uncertain future profits. (Well...kinda. There's also the question of control. Some shares give you a say in how a company is run; some don't. That's rarely a factor though.)
Notionally, incidentally, the value of a company's stock is the discounted sum of all future cash flows. If you owe 100% of Amazon, obviously you have the right to 100% of all future profit they make. If you owe 0.0001% of Amazon, you have the right to 0.0001% of all future profit they make. That's the core driver of stock prices; the market's ever-changing estimation of a companies future.
As for HFT...no, you won't make huge profits. The entire HFT industry, globally, makes chicken feed, but they make for VERY entertaining news stories, so you read about them a ton.
Anyhow, as to "why HFT is good", the answer is basically that we all benefit when markets work better, and one way markets can work better is if they are deep and liquid. In simple terms, that means that if you want to buy or sell something, there's always someone there offering to take the other side of the trade for more-or-less the market rate. Conversely, housing is a very shallow, very illiquid market. If you want to sell your $400k house, it might takes weeks or months, and you may find yourself happily paying significant fees to the broker, and maybe even selling it at a discount, just to get the damn thing to sell. If you want to sell your share of Apple stock, it will take microseconds, and you'll get very close to the market rate (ie, low commission/low spread). And while HFT doesn't have a huge impact, to the extent it has an impact, it is to make the market deeper, more liquid, and more efficient. HFT benefits the HFT traders, but it also, and this is really, really, important to grasp benefits every person who trades with the HFT traders. The losers are the "low frequency traders" who would have bought your Apple share from you a little slower and for a little less money, but lost out.
But again, this effect is minimal. The drive for HFT is the race for pennies in an increasingly efficient and competitive market. Small time investors, honestly, aren't the victims here. (Unless they're doing the day-trading, "I can pick stocks because I read a book on trend analysis" thing, in which case...they're absolutely screwed, but no more so now than before HFT. The stock market is not a game.)
And no, I wouldn't say the market is becoming "more one-sided"; that presupposes there being two sides. There aren't; there are seven billion sides. HFT does not profit at the expense of pension funds or entrepreneurs; it profits at the expense of everyone else who wanted to profit from them.
And I think the sports analogy is especially inapt. We want markets to work as efficiently as possible. We want sports to provide a spectacle. These things are not similar.