What an excellent posting by Airbus Girl. You have just about said it all. In fact, I find myself thinking of one of the wonderful outpourings of Ernest K Gann in his classic "Fate is The Hunter" in which he says something along the lines of:
"It is generally accepted that pilots are overpaid. It is also my experience that they generally earn their entire annual salary in just two minutes of the year. During those two minutes they would cheerfully give the whole lot back to be somewhere else".