The reason is the public is naive and this naive public not only puts faith in the airlines that they hire competent pilots but they probably don't have a clue what constitutes "high time" for a pilot. We all know very well what is low time vs. high time but 1000TT to the flying public may seem like a ton of time. Ask the little old lady in row 12 what she thinks is alot of flight time and I'm sure thats what you will hear.
In addition the public sees thousands and thousands of flights take-off and land every day, day in and day out without incident with the very same low time pilots that are now flying so they tend to take a percentage attitude that accidents in an aircraft still seem rare. Take all of this naive knowledge that the flying public has and it doesn't take a Wharton MBA to see why its all about PRICE. The only ones who give a rats a** about pilot time are PILOTS.