CFI has never been a good job. It wasn’t 40 years ago, it won’t be 40 years from now. What is different, and I agree with some posts I’ve read, is that now we are almost forcing CFIs to instruct 1200+ hours, where before the 1500 rule, they would just teach long enough to be sick of it and bail to a real job. There are other, much better options to time build, CFI is obviously still the most prevalent. Who knows, if majors keep sucking the regionals dry, and they dry up and stop service to small podunk towns, the Fed may open up more EAS that would allow more lower time pilots to have a stepping stone between CFI and FO.

And the whole “I’m a better pilot because I learned pt141 and you did pt61” is ridiculous. We all watch the same UND/King Schools/YouTube videos and study the same books now days. You still have good and bad students either way. You’re not the Second Coming of Bob Hoover because you learned pt141