I'm not sure that I understand what you are trying to say, David.
The main point I will take up, though, is your assertion about 'the odd pilot' who would behave in the way you describe. This is NOT the case to any statistically significant extent. The research is absolutely clear. MOST pilots (and most employees in other safety critical industries such as power generation and railways) behave in the way I described (but not quite in the way you interpreted it - see below).
Unfortunately, without rewriting all the books, one has to use shorthand in an email. You are correct in saying that pilots do not consciously say to themselves 'I hope I won't crash today'. Frequency gambling is mostly an unconscious cognitive process. At a certain frequency the unconscious becomes conscious. There is a stretch of highway near where I live which is notorious for accidents. When I drive on it I am conscious of the risk of accident in a way that I am not on most other roads. Pilots landing at the old Kai Tak were usually consciously aware of the risk of accident as the chequer board loomed up.
But the way it actually works is around scenarios like ----
'I have had flu for 4 days, and I still don't feel right. Now am I well enough to go back to work or not?' The answer to that question is more likely to be 'yes' if I know that I am running out of my 'bank' of legitimate sick days. We also know from the research that thousands of pilots making those sorts of decisions, produce an increase in incident frequency if there are management pressures to return early.
But the evidence is also that there are a few people (in high morale companies it is about 2-3%) who will abuse liberal sick leave provisions. When companies do the sorts of things that CX has reportedly done, then there are usually one or more of three explanations:
(a) there is a deeply seated management culture of mistrust of employees; or
(b) there are budget line by line approaches to cost control which take no account of the inter-related nature of the system under review;
(c) management are fixated on the 3% of abusers and don't care how much damage they do to their relationship with the other 97% in order to eliminate them.
Whichever way the effect is usually counter productive - that is, the costs of personnel non-compliance go up, not down. This is because of the negative feedback loop that is set up. Most people in professionally self motivated occupations will behave in a trustworthy manner until it is unequivocally demonstrated that they are not trusted. At that point a significant number of them will cease behaving in a trustworthy way.
In the airline business one side effect of breakdowns in trust between management and staff is increased frequency of safety critical incidents. My own frequency gambling involves my trying to avoid using airlines where I know that there is poor management, but without getting obsessive about it. When my business takes me to Alma Ata I have little choice and I don't fret about it. But in the meantime I'll probably go to Hong Kong two hours later than is optimal for me in order to not use CX.
I have provided simple, verifiable, research demonstrated, statistically recorded information, and my point is that competent management will always adopt policies which are informed by information which has those qualities. If you don't want to test your opinions against it, there isn't any basis for a discussion. If you have verifiable evidence to the contrary, let us hear it. Then you will give me cause to reassess my own views.