Air Profit - I would suggest the reason they don’t need based crew right now and can create rosters without them, is mainly because they are flying less than 4% of the schedule, and not because they want to demonstrate that they don’t need them.
Once things improve (A distant hope at this moment), I’ll be confident that they will be using the based crew to their full capacity again.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree that they won’t miss this opportunity to try and attack conditions on the base, but bases ultimately do save them money whether that’s directly through salary and benefits, or indirectly from keeping more pilots from leaving.