TopBunk,
My statement about the pilots response was made very much tongue in cheek...(think pensions) - of course they won't 'do' anything about it - they seem to regard it as a backwards step, but I agree with you that it won't make a huge amount of difference to their operations. They will still see the same loadsheet and the aircraft will still be trimmed legally and efficiently, the only difference may be minor delays incurred by the extra people that would have to be involved in trim / load changes.
I have no argument with the fact that TRC's do work, but I will say again, I cannot see how making things more complicated and expensive is a good thing. B707's with flight engineers worked, but these days that solution is considered too complicated and expensive...the piecemeal approach to aircraft systems management was replaced by an integrated solution (i.e EICAS / EFIS) and 25 years ago the piecemeal Load Control / TRC role was integrated into Dispatchers. We are going backwards..
In answer to your pay grade query, I don't know. I am not management and I'm not sure how they work these things out, but to quote verbatim from the 'Turnround Manager and Centralised Load Control Q & A pack Issue 1, Feb 20 2006' (In reference to TRM): "The grade for the job is APPG" (In reference to CLC): "If a current Dispatcher on an A6 grade is working in CLC their A6 pay will be protected" To clarify, APPG is two grades higher than A6.