fewer and fewer people can support themselves in the industry and the $80,000+ bill to get certificated makes no sense.
Amen to that, but how did it come about in the first place? Largely because young wannabes wouldn't go off and spend five or so years in GA, building their experience and hours, no, they wanted LHS of a jet NOW and were able to borrow the money to fund that idea, a trickle became a flood and now it is seen as the normal way ahead by many operators who jumped on a bandwagon these same young people presented them with. Impetuous youth and greedy bankers are more to blame than pilots that want to complete their career at 65, the original retirement age until the late seventies, early eighties in both the USA and the UK, excluding legacy carriers who are unrepresentative in numbers of the total pilot workforce anyway.