[Disclaimer: I'm not an airline pilot. Just a lowly grad student with 230 TT working on my commercial]

I don't think being an airline pilot would be that bad of a gig. It's not the best career in terms of how well it rewards vs. what you have to put in to get a job, but that shouldn't be a deal buster if it's all you really want to do in life. I wanted to be an airline pilot for a long time. But for one thing, now that I've got a few hundred hours, I'm realizing that flying the same flight profile on the same routes or similar routes, in the same airplane for the rest of my life wouldn't be that exciting. The reason flight training is so much fun is because you're always doing different things, always advancing to new airplanes, there's always a new procedure to learn or a new level of accuracy to shoot for. I don't really see those same traits in an airline pilot's lifestyle.

Personally, I'm a weekend pilot for now. If the military will have me, then I'll fly apaches for the army or f-16's for the ANG. If not, then I'll be a CFI on the weekends and an aerospace engineer during the week. I'm glad I didn't commit myself 100% to being an airline pilot.

I could still quit my job and go be an airline pilot within a few years if I decided I wanted to, but if I'd gone to ERAU, gotten a degree in aviation science, and was a furloughed RJ pilot, the reverse would not be true. YMMV.