Wiggily ...
I feel your pain dude. "Today's market" is indeed hopelessly screwed in favour of the 200 hour P2F brigade. The only jobs going right now are garbage, O'leary's mob and the Ezy flexi-screw and so on. And if you believe what the schools WANT you to believe, it is the only way in town and it will stay that way forever.
But ... I don't believe that the market has changed forever. Look at what's happening right now in the states, the politicians have pretty much legislated low-hour-RHS jobs out of existence in one fell swoop. And, I'm not talking about "today's market". I'm talking about the market that will return in 2 or 3 years (barring another global calamity or what have you).
I will bet my left nut, that there are still plenty of chief pilots out there who still value old-skool hours and experience gained by traditional methods. The problem is simply, that a lot of them work for airlines that haven't hired for 3 or 4 years. A lot of others, when they have hired, it's been only one or two people, who've been friends of friends who've grooming their target for years while they patiently built those hours.
But as sure as people retire, and global financial crises come and go and the price of oil rises and falls, those kind of airlines will hire again. They won't be widely advertising in Flight and they sure as eggs won't be running to OATS or CTC to start flogging ridiculous P2F schemes.
They won't be hiring 200 hour wonders either, whether they have type ratings and deep pockets or not ... they will be hiring those people who are grinding it out right now in smaller aircraft and really learning their trade.
It takes 2 or 3 or 5 years to get meaningful 4-figure sums of hours in the logbook anyway.
So the question is, if you are not willing to participate in "today's market" as a 200 hour bend-over-and-squeal boy (a decision which I heartily applaud!), then are you going to go out there and get ready to participate in tomorrow's market by staying current and getting some damn hours in that logbook by any means necessary?
One thing is for sure, if I had sat on my fat ass 20 years ago with 200 hours doing nothing except "applying to airlines", I would still have 200 hours now.