Additionally, I believe it is unfair, or at least counter-productive to compare a start-up airlines pay with those of established carriers. It does nothing for the discourse and it does not accomplish the most important task of APC which is to inform current pilots or prospective ones.

I think a more realistic and serviceable argument would be to lump the LCCs, Legacies, etc (any identifiable group) and compare starting pay at a start-up against starting pay at the others in the group when they were start-ups. with this kind of data you can look at several ratios: compared to legacy pay at the time, purchasing power, etc. With this kind of hard data, you could truly tell who the bottom feeders were and it would serve to remove some of the emotion from the argument. Simply saying "they are lowering the bar because of...." is short and to the point, but it lacks anykind of hard data that would give the argument relevance. JMHO.