Jaglawyer
" Send all of us 55+Trainers packing and that would help promotions wouldn't it".
Well, for the first few months after you were retired, upgrades would slow down. But once you had been replaced, hopefully by those pilots in their 3rd and 4th decades of life, command rate would be faster than before as the number of command slots available are no longer restricted by those that choose to extend. If they really wanted or needed you that badly they would have offered A scales. They offer such inferior conditions so that the cost of extending you, with associated bypass pay, is not much greater than it would have been if they had upgraded an FO!
This recent generation of pilots is much younger than for the past decade so it is likely to have lots of C+Ters in their 30s and 40s. So I imagine with a little bit of forethought, CX could easily plan ahead for the occasional C+T dinosaur that approaches 55, to be replaced before he retires. The whole "get a greater PF mulitplier" by being in C+T does not apply to B scalers.
So yes after an initial hiccup, we will have lots more commands now that extendees aren't blocking training positions, basings etc. And it would be nice to be trained by pilots who don't complain about how many 1000s of options they got for their pay cut in 99. It would be nice to be trained by pilots who don't have pictures of porsches or ferraris in their wallet! It would be nice to be trained by guys who actually had to spend 10years getting their command, this decade.