Kansas City isn't hard to hold as a junior reserve CA. You can upgrade at any time once you reach 1500hrs (unofficially - put in your upgrade bid when you have around 1450-1480ish hours - or about one to two weeks of worth of flying)

Any newhire FO's can look at getting a hardline (e.g. no reserve) right away out of training.

Any new captains or streethire captains can look at being on reserve until they have about 1.5 years of seniority. The reason being Air Midwest isn't releasing the more senior captains that have been awarded ERJ/CRJ captain at Freedom/Mesa. So there is a captain backlog that doesn't seem to be getting shorter.

I think the reason why Air Midwest is upgrading any FO to Captain even when they don't have enough FOs to fill all the FO positions is because once you're a Captain you will most likely stay instead of running off to another regional - and the company can still use you (as a Captain) to cover open FO shifts.

But Air Midwest has filled two newhire classes of 16 each since it started doing its own when Mesa Air Group stopped sending newhires to Air Midwest.