You deserve to fly a mainline aircraft, or an RJ at close to mainline pay.

Regional flying, if you can really call it that anymore, is just a way that the legacies have outsourced their own flying to lower costs. Keeping the minimum requirement to become a pt121 FO means that people have to instruct or do cargo etc like you did.

Sure people can list examples of some idiot that violated a bunch of airspace from ERAU, but think about this, at least they did it in a 172 and not a transport category aircraft with paying passengers in the back. So from that perspective it is an argument for the ATP qualification.