I am not a professional pilot, but I have a close relative who is one of your number on short haul out of LGW. I am by training an ethnographic researcher, and I specialise in people at work. I do some research and consultancy work in the airline industry.
Within the past two years I have tracked a surgeon in a large hospital for a number of days, and I have also sat in the jump seat with my relative on a four sector day on two occasions. I treated those days as a research project, although I was just being curious about what my relative does for a living.
My professional conclusion from comparing those two days is - it's a draw. Yes, I believe pilots deserve to be paid as much as surgeons. Although that is an over-simplified statement. I think that pay systems for given professions need to be thought of across a whole career trajectory. Simple annual pay comparisons are too crude a measure.
My main observation for this discussion is that a job description for someone flying short haul in and out of LGW and in European airspace generally gives only a tenuous link to what doing that job is actually like. My notes for one of the days records 86 unanticipated disruptions to the planned flow of work. Some of these were minor and quickly dealt with, but others produced flow on pressures (e.g. "there is a military aircraft in your sector which has just declared an emergency, and we have lost contact with it"). On the worst of the days I observed the surgeon he had 42 such disturbances.
The reason for this difference is that an operating theatre is a closed (and therefore relatively easily controlled) system once the door is closed, but an airliner enters an OPEN system once the door is closed. (This is a double edged comment. My main concern about the way pilots view the world is that they have a predisposition to regard their flight decks as a closed system, and therefore they often discount and underestimate the significance of the feedback loops with the environment).
In any event I now believe that it is impossible for anyone in airline management to make sensible management decisions unless they have direct experience of what actually happens in day to day flight operations. Even if they were to commission someone like me to write a report on it, that would be no adequate substitute for direct personal experience.
In a post of reasonable length it is not possible to explain why I also believe that the empirically demonstrable differences between the work of airline pilots and that of other sorts of 'drivers' is far, far more than just 'they can't pull over and stop'.