Welcome to the forums. Take everything you read here with a grain of salt. You're going to find 2 types of people here....the ones who already find you annoying before you even wrote your first post and the ones who genuinely want to help you. This forum, albeit having a ton of great folks, also houses 99% of the 2% of pilots who are bitter, discontent and right out do*che ridden that will always find a way to make it seem as if the glass is half empty. So, if you find people being snarky or rude at you for asking a fair question, try to ignore them.

In regards to your question, yeah the regionals will still be here in 5-10 years but the role they will play will not be as significant as it is today, with the 50% of all domestic flying they currently do.

The biggest issue they face now besides the obvious is that there's just not enough new pilots being churned out in colleges, universities and mom and pop shops that will fill the void from the BOTTOM once the majors start hiring for real. The demand is too high and the supply of newly minted 1500 hour CFIs is dwindling down to a halt (metaphorically speaking).

What will happen is that the majors will absorb some of the regional flying and regional flying will finally go back to being regional flying, as in, transporting people from tiny cities to major hubs (nowadays, regionals do mainline flying all the time).

This only means good news for all pilots because as the regionals will have a hard time keeping up with the demand of the majors, the majors will start placing more pilots into 100-seaters being put under their certificates, wether it's E190s or CS100s that will satisfy the "regional" routes that are currently being flown by 76-seaters as a test bed that transfers into 100+ seaters because of the demand.

Also remember that even though almost everyone at the regionals want to move on to something bigger and better, some simply can't....whether it's because of a thing on their record, no college degree or old age, and/or because some are simply happy to stay in the regional world forever as they have gotten too comfortable with their seniority, their days off and the plane they fly. Besides, you can easily make $80-100k a year as a senior Captain at a regional and to some people, that's more than enough.

Point is, these are great times to enter this career, and even though things could get worse, they'll probably never get as bad as they used to be.