If someone has made it all the way through the fATPL then they do deserve a job
No way! A CPL/IR is a trophy - a bit of paper saying you have completed the appropriate examinations to hold a very basic flying qulification. It most certainly does not mean that you deserve, or are adequately qualified for, an airline job - all it means is that you are qualified to
apply for
some junior airline jobs. 250 hours may feel like a lot to you after 18 months of exhausting and expensive training; to me and my recruiting colleagues it's sod all - not quite three months' line flying.
GRIFFIN has got it a bit upside down also: he seems to be suggesting that you should be psycho-profiled before you're allowed to spend your own money on a speculative qualification. Rubbish! If I want to go and do a medical degree at 48 years old, and I have the money to do so, no-one can stop me. If I want to pay to drive a Formula 1 car, no-one can stop me. But if I applied to be a Doctor or an F1 driver, I would have to run through the assessment process of the appropriate recruiters - and I probably wouldn't get very far.
It is not the job of employers (or anyone else) to tell you what qualifications you should be allowed to take. That's completely up to you. But if you want to work for me, I will require from you very high minimum standards of paper qualifications, experience, and evidence of suitability for the task at hand. Where the job offered is for people new to the profession, I will require you to go through various assessment procedures that will allow me to judge whether you are likely to make a good pilot in my airline - which may have a very different ethos from the airline over the road.
That is not the job of the examination authorities; it is the airlines' job.
Scroggs