Pilots underselling themselves is their choice. Forking out large chunks of money to get in that position is nuts too.
I am not sure the travelling public deserve to have their lives in the hand of a so called profession where the "professionals" are quite prepared to cut each others throats just to fly airplanes. It does not stack up.
Try telling the public that you are so desperate to fly that you paid £50k for all your training, worked for next to nothing to log hours as an instructor, blew another £15k on a type rating, all without any certainty of a job and then when a job comes along the pay is little better than pocket money.
There is a bit of a paradox there dont you think?