Slightly off thread here, it is worth mentioning that whilst we all appreciate the whole industry is in a mess, for a number of reasons, it is not only the "wannabes" that find this "situation" frustrating.
Senior pilots are constantly encouraged to find ways of saving operational costs, one could argue that this rationale is protecting their jobs, and that goes without saying, however the primary undercurrent to " reduce the cost per cockpit" is now resulting in an experience gradient verging on dangerous. The highly paid training Captain wants to keep a job and as such accepts that sitting next to a guy with 170 hrs on a mid haul flight is now par for the course, the ordinary line Captain doesn't really want to go into training..why fly every hour god sends and get bogged down in paperwork. These days, a lot of TCs are only paid suppliments when training, they still accept this as their training credits are kept current. The ordinary line Captain gets to fly with the " finished product", only to find the guy gets canned as his paid sectors have finished.. again no stability, and a potential CRM nightmare. All this is very bad for the industry, safety, standards and morale.
The monies saved on crew wages with these schemes seems to dissapear into a black hole, whenever I question this practice I am told this is keeping me in work!
I am aware that some ACMI companies used to use practically every sector for line training, a lot of this was stopped by the clients and hull insurers with the caveat " only company employees to be trained". This has resulted in a shortage of capacity and a lot of people " started but not finished" sitting around waiting for sectors.
There is enough "fat" in the type rating course and line training costs to allow the TRTO/ partner airline to at least provide a small " training salary" whilst the student is line training. The real issue here is greed and reluctance to accept that the "suffering" should be evenly distributed, we cannot stop this practice but we can encourage change.