Bypassing guys on the list is not necessarily dangerous in itself, its just reality. What is dangerous is the fact that you will potentially have a really ****ed off F/O to have to fly with.
It has less to do with the bypassing itself but rather than a poorly run operation and industry. The reason that any company has to hire directly from the street for the left seat is it doesnt have enough quality F/O's that are capable of upgrading to move upward.

The good ones have all moved on by the time they are ready for upgrade to ExpressJet or Skywest. There are several guys on this board that have done just that. Its a basic supply and demand situation. In the case of colgan, there is demand but no quality supply internally. It was that way there 10-15 years ago and it is like that again there now.

When you hire 500/80 what can you really expect. Besides a big ego that is covering up for lack of real world flying skills. At that amount of flight time its really unrealistic to expect that from them anyways. They are going to need two good years of line flying to get them ready anyways. Not to mention the maturity of their grey matter between the ears as well.

When they hire a 500 hour pilot and if you were able to fly 1000 per year its still going to be 2 to 2 1/2 years before the insurance companies are going to buy off on a pilot upgrading to captain.

So there is going to naturally be a void left in the middle. Besides if you sit back and look at the industry as a whole, the poorly run companies always seem to be the ones that hire street captains when times get tough. Once in the industry long enough you will get to see the boom to bust cycles and it constantly repeats itself.