As a professional pilot for BA or VS back home I could buy a 4 bedroom house near the city and live comfortably.
Really? Have you seen the joining salaries of BA recently? Or time to command?
If you join without expat benefits and are an expat you will spend you WHOLE career paying off some tiny flat next to the airport, lovely place to retire once the whole 800 sq/ft are all yours!
Rubbish. By the time you get to captain on $130k+ if you can't afford a decent place to live you've screwed up somewhere.
Yes you can survive on what they are offering but why the hell would you want to. I got into this profession so I could do more than survive, why people continue to enter it is a mystery.
Read my post(s) again - $45k is more than survivable, and by FO, $90k+ is pretty good in anyone's book. It's definitely not what it was under expat terms, but looking at it without those tinted specs (or from the point of view of having never had that!) it's OK.