Who's determining "quality" here. It's the executives that make the call on that, and they see their managers as more critical than the pilots. Pilots are willing to take crumbs and work 16 hours/day - managers are not. From their point of view, they can replace a pilot in a minute - they are no more valuable than bus drivers in their minds. They get the planes from Pt A to Pt B, that's all.

After all, we do this to ourselves. What other industry is filed with people that think that 300-hr employees are just as good as 5,000 hr employees? Lawyers, doctors, and most all other professions value experience and maintain standards. Pilots, on the other hand, will argue that the guy that just bought his rating and has a still wet ticket is just as capable as the 15-yr veteran at flying paying passengers in any weather condition.

As long as the pilots act as if they are all widgets, any one just as capable as the others, so will management.