G'day snarek,
Interesting point of view you raised. A lot of pilots can easily achieve the theoretical and flying standard under the current CPL syllabus. But as you already aluded to, issues such as insurance cover for low time pilots is the problem. Having said that though I know of some very good CPLs who have gone through in between 200 and 300 hrs, have been picked up for charter work and done very well. Most of them though had gained a good broad range of experience in those hrs since PPL flight test.
Not sure about the idea of using the financial filter idea of weeding out the marginals based on their ability to pay over the exteded period to get their hours. To me this is something of a double edged sword as it unfairly penalises those who have very good skills and abilities but lets those with mummy and daddy's financial backing to slip through.
I didn't do my CPL until I had about 600 or 700hrs up. That included a fair bit of jump flying, a couple of SE and ME ferries across Oz and some other very worthwhile experience. With that, I managed to do my CPL without too much difficulty. I know I was damn lucky though, right place right time and a lot of good contacts. Unfortunately a lot of pilots aren't so lucky and many would find it difficult if not impossible to get those sort of hours up before getting their unrestriced/unfrozen or whatever CPL.
I had a couple of good gigs flying C210s in charter for a while but the oversupply of pilots meant the work was too unreliable to try and make a living out of.
I think GA is just one of those professions where we will always have an oversupply of pilots. Working for free is the real killer, not the fact that someone has more hours than someone else. As soon as this practice is stopped, the result will be less opportunities and then we might see the numbers of CPLs come down to a more realistic level.