Oh goody, I'll have the last word then!
The better you crew flights the less crew are required and so the more difficult the job becomes.
Wrong. There is a minimum number of crews you need, once you have taken into account sickness, leave, disruption, and so on. A typical figure would be 3.6 crews per aircraft. However, as flybe has such a disjointed base structure and route network (because they change the master plan with such regularity), they usually require a slightly higher figure.
You now have a problem, because Crewing know how many crews are required, based on experience and projections, but the Ops Director usually comes up with a different figure - because he has to satisfy a budget constraint imposed by his boss. The usual result is that the Ops Director is forced to make the programme work with less money than it really needs. Thus we have an under-staffed and under-resourced Crewing department, having to make it all happen with less crews than the job requires. If this goes on for any length of time, you see blowouts in the HOTAC budget, and you see the company desperately buying leave and days off from crews because they have no standbys.
So you can see (well, maybe you can't) that the real problem lies with the financial constraints on the department, not with how clever Crewing are. The reality is that they have not been able to be significantly cleverer for a few years now.
Sadly, the result of Crewing coping heroically and making the programme happen, is that the directors assume that all is well, and completely fail to see the unrest and dissent in the ranks.
Mind you, I am sure that in your rose-tinted world, there is no dissent, no unrest, and there are regular group hugs in the BHX crewroom...
Many people invest in their careers by going to university and also have a great deal of debt once finished.
Who, in Crewing, has a degree? I don't know of anybody, with a degree, that has worked in Crewing in the last seven years. Well, maybe Sally did, but she was really good at her job. She actually helped the crews, remember favours done for Crewing (that no longer happens), and went out of her way to be considerate. Those were the days...
flightdeck crew can expect the earn a higher salary than average in order to pay off their debt.
... which is just as well, as their level of debt is correspondingly higher...
The best we can hope for is that those new to flying read the rule book before they start, at least this way they may appreciate the life and career path chosen before embarking upon it.
Well, if they read the BA rulebook, or the FR rulebook, or the Easyjet rulebook, they will be pretty shocked when they turn up at flybe...
BTW flybe is a good company, they just have some blind spots, which have needed fixing for years. I still rate them very highly, but I'm not unable to see the bad bits, as you clearly are.