at the end of the day, it is the bottom line that counts at many companies, and if they can put bums on the front two seats for the least possible payroll while meeting the requirements, then they will. Not saying they will go for legal minimums of experience - just that they will try to pay as little as possible for that experience.
And hence the ENTIRE DISCUSSION.
If you have 2600 hours, that is not nothing, but it is not 15,000 hours. And there ARE pilots with 15,000 hours who are willing to work for less than they are actually worth. And there will ALWAYS be pilots willing to work for less than they are worth.
Of course there are. If there was another "profession" that made you feel as good doing it, there would be a shortage of positions in that profession also. Especially one that allows people with less than a 4-year degree's worth of experience to be in that profession.
If you work in another profession, let's take IT for example, you probably have to have a 4-year degree (for some old-timers this is not the case, but for anyone getting into it in the last 15-20 years, a 4-year degree is a minimum, many now are entering with masters and phds), and with just a degree, you'd start as an entry level programmer, working with a senior programmer. You wouldn't start out as the senior Oracle database administrator...
But, in the aviation profession, particularly about 2-4 years ago, we had many many "under-qualified" pilots being placed because there was an extreme shortage of pilots. However that blip is gone, and we're back to the way it was before. And before that blip, the average pilot either went from the air force to a civilian jet, or instructed for 2-5 years, then local/135 or maybe regional for 5-10 years, then national, having 10-15 years experience. And converting that into hours, you see that 2600 is what most instructors had for the previous 4-5 decades, excluding 2-3 years ago.