The whole idea behind starving wages for flying airplanes stems from the social contract of a quick upgrade and a move up to livable wages via mainline jobs. That model is dead, there is no movement. People however, dead set on flying for a living, choose to put themselves in a "life holding pattern", staunchly pursuing regional work for decades, and the rest is history, as is Colgan Air not ironically enough. People who pursue regional work with the express intent on making it a career are fooling themselves, all because they regard flying for money as the only worthwhile pursuit in their lives that provides contentment.
The only way to sustain the current model is to up the pay at the regionals, but that's simply not in the cards. The airline compensation model has always been back-loaded. Why is it so backloaded? Because people keep showing up , debt or no debt alike, for a 22K job. It's a very inelastic demand. It's pretty sad when the government has to step in and discourage people to work for free via barriers to entry. Usually the low pay would dissuade people from pursuing such employment. The reality though is that most people go in with optimism bias: "Im only gonna make crap for a couple years, I'll make decent money here in a little bit". For many, that little bit is 10 years and a lifer regional CA position where the only place your seniority number is going to get you is back to square one when the now mature regional airline folds due to top heavy labor costs on a model that depends on the premise cheap entry level labor costs, and you have no line number at Delta to prevent you from summarily being priced out of your own vocation.
It is a free country though, people are free to work for peanuts....
As I've said before, I'd love to proverbially ride roller coasters for a living, but I ain't gonna do it for Malaysian shoe maker wages just because I like riding roller coasters. I'll do something else to pay for life and fly for fun. Make no mistake, Colgan happened because two people valued manipulating the controls of an airplane more than to recognize they had no business nor the economic ability to afford to de facto recreationally zoom people in the sky for hire. They had no quarrel commuting from BFE on two red eyes and doing it on the subsidy of their parents housing. And innocent people died for someone else's dream. I love flying as much as the next guy but that's not ok.
Life's not fair. We don't all get to get reasonably paid to live our dreams. Sometimes we gotta live our dreams through avocations. Recognizing that is maturity.