As stated, people will come out of the woodwork to fill a desirable pilot seat.

There's no connection to the unwashed masses that will fill the seats at poor paying, less desirable "regional" (contract) flying who can be essentially trained from almost nothing. The rules are still such that a 250 hour wet commercial puts you large and in charge at your choice of crappy regional.

Just because only 300-ish commercial licenses were issued doesn't mean that we can't crank out 1,000 or even 10,000 next year. Easy.

The only "boom" will be fly-by-night pilot puppy mills cranking out the required number of suckers (and their parents) who will pay lots of money to jump into the circus.

But you say, "Oh, Tony, we're gunna git us some 1500 hour / ATP rule some day".

Ya, let me know how that works out. It will be full of swiss cheese holes, cutting out lots of exceptions, and for those who don't qualify for an exemption, there will be another boom in puppy mills to get you to 1500/ATP.

Nothing that mommy and daddy's cubic dollars can't solve. P.T. Barnum was a smart guy.