Folks, unfortunately you can't have a mass exodus and delayed promotion simultaneously.
You will have to stick with one doomsday scenario at a time I am afraid.
It seems like you have a hard time understanding complex situations with many moving parts.
When an airline does not grow, that reduces the number of promotions. Cathay is not growing. As someone already mentioned, many planes have left the fleet recently and continue to do so. 21 777s are leased and leaving to make room for the newer 777s.
Crewing complement has changed. 2SO long haul will be the norm on all long haul. That reduces the number of FOs required.
CMP has removed a lot of inefficiencies in rostering by hand. This has squeezed out more productivity out of the pilots we do have. Which has the effect of reducing all rank requirements.
All these measures plus the constant reduction of our benefits and pay have resulted in high resignation rates. This is offset by continuous recruitment and lowering of standards to try to minimise the impact. Are you seriously saying you have not seen the barrage of standards changes for all ranks?
You might want to take your own advise as well. You talk about contradicting signals. Here’s one, you can’t have so much smoke without a fire, yet post after post from you say the smoke is fake and there is no fire.
Your trolling is getting old and more desperate with every post. Keep it up please, it is quite entertaining and provides great opportunity to highlight the smoke.