It would be interesting to see how many hundreds of thousands (maybe millions?) of dollars the company has saved this year alone with this move. I hadn't really thought about it until someone on the other forum started asking about why elitt suddenly went from 30 trips to 4. That is 26 trips that would have been flown by you and me, many at premium pay, that are now given to new FOs to fly for nothing.
As someone else said, this is a FO problem, so it won't get solved in our new contract since FOs aren't even actual people.