Put another way, those regional pilot pay raises increased ticket costs about $2 per passenger, per flight. Divide $2 by the average ticket price to see how much of a total impact it was.

I checked the Google Flight prices of one-way tickets for some regional routes and the majority are about $200. If your travel is super flexible, you might be able to get some <$100 one way tickets, but that's the exception, not the norm. Flying out of your local, small town airport has a convenience fee that is significantly higher than the highly competitive hub-to-hub markets that have been competed down to razor thin margins. I lived in podunk military towns and routinely drove 4+ hours to a hub to fly anywhere because I couldn't afford the convenience fee that tripled my plane ticket cost if I flew from my local airport.

I think the regionals have not been the razor thin operation everyone has been led to believe and wages were so low because, well, people were willing to work under those conditions. Now, most regional pilots can do basic math and see that the pay raises and bonuses for staying at a regional come at a heavy cost of seniority at a career destination, so legacy management is trying to figure out if it's worth increasing ticket costs (or letting the costs eat into profit) $2,3,maybe $5, to keep the model alive, at least until they can work out the logistics of an alternative.

Realistically, it's likely in the near future it'll be normal for 1,500 hour pilots to go straight to the legacies, skipping the regionals altogether, so I think the legacies are going to have to take some notes from the regionals and be prepared to train pilots with varied backgrounds who've never flown jets before. Also, I've never flown with an FO who was an idiot, but I've flown with quite a few low-time FOs who didn't know what they didn't know and spooked me. So, brace yourselves.