General Mathematics is better because it is more applied mathematics. Mathematics Advanced is just BLAH. It's just that Year 9 and 10 stuff, but extended. To me it just seems that Mathematics Advanced is more dry - you just memorise the formula and apply it. Any fool who can follow instructions knows how to do this.
However, although General involves applying formulae ... at least they are formulae worth memorising and can be applied in day to day life, not only in contrived insipid "exercises". But really, if you hate math (in school, as an HSC subject) you should NOT be doing it at all. And it is just ridiculous to say to someone, "but mathematics is useful to society, so you must study it."
1. Mathematics is NOT intentionally useful to society. It has useful consequences. Mathematics is intended to be fun, a game, playing - using your imagination to create for yourself problems and then solve them.
2. English is useful to society, probably more so than math as it teaches you to communicate with fluency and eloquency, both in the spoken and written word.
And the scaling of higher mathematics courses is simply ridiculous. I would challenge any mathematics extension 2 student to try to learn a foreign language and see how they go. Something like Chinese (Mandarin), a very difficult language which scales quite poorly is much more difficult than following instructions to solve problems.
Maybe if more gifted people invested their time in language courses they would have better scaling?
Anyhow, General scales poorly, because the people who do it often do it just for the sake of doing math, so they put in little effort and get poor results, scaling the subject down. Mathematics has the same scaling as Biology, I believe (or thereabouts). If you're confused about which to do, then DO NOT do math at all.