Sadly the only thing that causes real change in commercial aviation is a smoking hole with lots of dead bodies.
You mention this at the same time as speculating that airline bean counters will cut training standards which might lead to this. Even if it did, and it has in recent years in a rather major airline, it will be the XAA's who demand an improvement in training standards and not the internal bean counters. They have already run cost/risk assessment scenarios whereby they believe what size and number of 'mis-haps' they can sustain. It will all be down to the XAA's to demand change, but they seem to act retrospectively rather than proactively.