Flow is career insurance, and it's a great thing to have. There are guys who, sometime entirely without fault, spent decades at the regionals. Flow puts a backstop to that. It's not perfect, but it's pretty close and much better than anything else.

But it should never, ever, ever be your main plan. If you're wondering about time to flow, you are doing it wrong. Wanna be all type-A? Obsess about time to upgrade and how many hours you can actually block in a year if you hustle. Time to 1000 TPIC is the metric that will tell you how quick you can get to a career job.