Some interesting points of view on this issue.
Bealebub's post is certainly a fair assessment of the current awful situation facing the industry as a whole but in my opinion you can't extrapolate from there and reasonably place this poisoned chalice at the feet of the individual 'first runger'. That would be akin to blaming the individual consumer for house price inflation because it was they who paid over-the-odds in a rising property market. Yet we don't blame the consumer because we know it was Government policy and Bank greed that lit the fire; consumers had little choice but to fuel it for fear of missing out on buying their own homes.
So I really don't think you can blame the people entering the industry now for the Aviation Industry's move to the no frills, low cost shorthaul model over the last ten years. I agree that each person who signs up to work in the low cost model is greasing the pole and we'll continue to slide down it, but for every person who atruistically says a big 'NO', there will be 3 more who will say an enthusiastic 'YES'. In my opinion there is no realistic way of reversing this trend aside from regulation in the form of introducing a requirement to hold an ATPL before flying a passenger jet.
In the absence of regulation, are those with talent and real desire to be commercial pilots, who would be willing to take a more traditional course into the industry if that particular river hadn't almost dried up, supposed to sit back and watch their peers surf ahead of them on the Ryanair wave?
A controversial thought: Is gaining a job with Ryanair a kind of modern day Pyrrhic victory yet perhaps a little preferable to being stuck in the doldrums?