I used to argue this same thing when I was a low timer. The old argument that "you need experience to get the job, but need the job to get the experience" can be very frustrating at that point. Pilots in my hire class came in with all sorts of backgrounds, from 4000+ hr corporate and freight drivers to 400 hr CFIs. We're all exposed to different things during those hours, but in general what it comes down to is the more time you are flying, the more practice you have at your hard-earned skills, and the more chance you will encounter something out of the ordinary that will require you to test those skills. That being said, we all basically started at square one once we began airline training, and it was just a matter of how well we learned what we were taught. After training, it was just a matter of once again getting comfortable with the airplane and all sorts of normal and abnormal situations, which again showed me the value of experience. Recently I retrained on a different airplane, so now the process starts again.