Believe it or not, but airlines (or any company for that matter) do not base their business models around staffing levels. Your opinion is akin to "Gas stations are now required to have two people on duty instead of one. They decide to only be open half the time so they don't have to hire more people". Nonsense. They may require their gas station attendants to work longer hours (that's fewer days off for pilots), pay them less, or *gasp* raise prices in order to cover the increased cost in staffing levels, but they won't cut off supply simply because of the pilots.

Now, there might be a happy medium between "massive hiring" and "no hiring", because the airline might say "it now costs $300 to fly between a and b, and only x amount of people are willing to pay that, so we're going to reduce frequency", but that will only be in a very very few select markets that are teetering on the edge of discontinuance anyway. The cost of a pilot in the overall cost structure is so minuscule, that it would raise the price from $300 to $318 an hour to DOUBLE pilot costs (that means hiring twice as many). A 5% increase in pilot staffing levels across the board would raise that same fare to $300.90.

Do I think that there will be a hiring boom solely due to FT/DT reregulation? No. It will mitigate some furloughs and induce some small scale hiring in places. However, the effects across the industry will certainly be felt. If staffing levels need to be increased by, say 1% across the board, and if we guess that there are 100000 airline jobs out there now, then that's 1000 pilots that either get saved or get hired due to this alone. Combine that with a slowly improving (or not worsening, at least) economy, and those numbers start to look better. Will there be a shortage? Of course not, but hopefully there will be a few people saved from the street.