The 300 hour wonder pilot is and always has been a giant myth. Yes it happened, but very, very rarely in numbers or time periods. UAL went crazy doing that for different reasons for a short while, and some regionals did it too for a very limited time. The vast majority of regionals always required "12 and 2" or greater, if not by policy then certainly to be competitive, even when smaller legacy airlines were hiring more per year than they are now. Even when regionals were wasting pilot talent flying pax around 19-30 at a time. Saying the regional industry needs 300 hour wonder pukes to staff flights is a cosmic joke. They don't and they never did, even during the record hiring of the late 90's.
As for time building, the system over all isn't just going to need wet commercial tickets (even if we did eliminate the new mins) but also mass quantities of new instructors. There isn't much pipeline productivity to gain by trying to shave off a few hundred hours when any instructor that wants to can get 80+ hours a month anyway. Yet the same A4A types that squeal about higher mins aren't doing jack squat to address the true bottom end which is new pilot and new instructor supply.
The slight amount of spool up we're seeing on that end is almost exclusively coming from fantasy camp business models thinking everyone needs to pay 6 figures for ratings and everything has to be done in brand new quarter million dollar overpriced G1000 suite aircraft. That is rediculous. If a legacy is truly worried about staffing its feeders, they need to ramp up (or just buy and expand) a 141/61 flight school, fill it with cheap used high time 2-4 seat round dial planes and sell ratings for cost. Problem solved. But these days anything "education" is raging on government steroids. If a major in French ceramics cost 6 figures, I guess an aviation degree and a couple ratings has to be more, right?
Also, why aren't they lobbying for another general aviation revitalization act? The trial lawyer lobby hated the last one, and their spin machine is back up again, calling for the skies to be raining down with our precious children if the noble defenders of justice can't shotgun sue anyone and anything for every accident but the last act was a HUGE success. Its time for another one.