Barring a large drop in flying for whatever cause the regionals are going to shrink....a lot. Senior F/O's are getting interviews with major airlines and they're already short Captains at most regionals. Some numbers I've seen are 9000 pilots being hired by B737/A320 and larger operators in the next 12-18 months. The vast majority of those will come from regional airlines. They are roughly 20,000 Regional Pilots right now. So nearly half the pilots gone in the next 12-18 months.

I think the only way they're going to fix this is putting Regional Pilots on mainline seniority lists so when they flow they'll get paid as though they'd been at mainline all that time. Or something similar, perhaps even merging into mainline which I think is least likely. It'll give the mainline unions some major negotiating power.