Yeah, that's why/how the Delta MEC was sold on RJs in the early 1990s. It was short-sighted then...mostly a case of zipper suited sun gods too good to fly a RJ.

It cost thousands of pilots millions of dollars.

Thus, why its hard to feel too much sympathy for the legacy pilot groups writ large, as unfair as it is to the junior guys who will be the obvious billpayers. The Delta, Northwest, American and United guys that allowed scope to kill the career expectations of two or three generations of pilots are all drooling in their oatmeal right now.

That doesn't fix the problem that potentially thousands of legacy pilot will be either working under C scale or out of a job entirely, as a bunch of regional guys fly DL, AMR or UA pax around.