Essentially there are two points here, the first being about whether or not someone that offered to pay for a TR should be given a chance and the second being about whether the old school, work-hard-at-day-then-go-to-the-airfield-and-wash-planes approach is still viable.
The former - well, I've hired many, many people into different positions, but I haven't ever been involved in airline recruitment. Therefore all I can say is that I accept your greater experience in that field - although I think it's very, very dangerous to assume that a self improver is necessarily better than others. My guess is that the "best" talent, will actually be evenly split - but as you'll be aware, recruitment is always subjective and you, I and uncle Tom Cobley are at liberty to use whichever factors you wish to differentiate between candidates.
The latter. Well, I think you consistently miss the point around how bloody expensive it has become to get into the game. I don't know whether you think I'm lying around the average(ish) cost, or whether you just choose to ignore it. But it's a moot point, because with [genuine] respect, I seriously doubt you would stand up on a public forum and say "yeah, actually given how much more it costs now, than when I did it, I wouldn't be able to have done it same way". But rhetorically speaking, COULD you do it the way you did it now? Could you fund that fifty grand for your initial licence, whilst holding down two jobs?
As an example, following the Dudeness's reply earlier, I did a little [not very in depth] research - an average electricians salary apparently is around £14700 (which I hasten to add, I think the website may have wrong). Now, that leaves us £11800 p.a. after tax if we assume a £15k p.a salary. Less than a £1k a month. You seriously think you could flight train on that now AND live? A quick calculation and I reckon if you were prudent you could possibly squeeze 2 hours a month out of that. So, 75 months to even get the hours required to start a CPL - before we've got to the expensive part!
You are of course right, in that half the problem is a reticence TO do it, not so much that it's not possible. But I just ask that you stop and consider how many years you'd have to work to fund your training if you started now. It's all very well complaining that it's just the same noises again and again and again, but that doesn't stop those noises being true! Likewise, the deafening pining for a bygone era when the option TO work your way up the ranks is equally tedious.
The bottom line is the cost is [virtually] prohibitive to the routes you and the dudeness took now. People just cannot afford to spend £50k and then spend another 3 years earning maybe £20k as an FI whilst you wait for air taxi, or a turboprop job to come up, to earn - again - rubbish money.
This is where the problem comes in. I agree it's immoral, but this is why people pay for the ratings - because it gives them the pay back on the investment.
Unfortunately I can't really say what I want to, without taking pages and pages. Which I can't be arsed to write, which I suspect you can't be arsed to read and I'm pretty damned certain you wouldn't even partially agree with anyway. Therefore it's perhaps best discussed over a pint at some point, should we ever meet. FWIW, I don't think our perspectives are actually too disaligned.