A perspective from a CFI who is a few months away from the 121 world..
I wouldn’t want the decrease in time required to be in the flight deck. 1500 hours did the regionals some good. Probably wouldn’t be a pilot if I were making $19k/yr. I made more working at the front desk of a resort making $10/hr right after H.S.
Now, someone else mentioned that 700-800 hours for things to start clicking. I totally agree. I couldn’t imagine flying a jet at 250 TT. I felt prepared/ready to take on the challenge of a jet at around that TT. How would I have actually faired? The world will never know.
I will say this though, regionals won’t increase the training footprint because that costs them A LOT of money. A recruiter once told me that it’s in the ballpark of $50,000 to train a trainee. I’m sure the actual numbers are not far from that if you include ATP-CTP, min guarantee, per diem, and hotels for a 2-3 months. I do believe that they’ll start paying for time building. It’s much cheaper, gets CFIs in sooner and they can drop the program when the next downturn happens (i.e. Republic pre-covid).
That’s my .02 anyways.