And if nobody pays... What then?
Quick thought experiment.
If nobody else paid that amount of money, then how would they get their pilots? Same for any airline. If people stopped paying to work, then the airlines would need to start recruiting people and paying for those people's training. Think about it.
ALL THE DELUDED PAY TO TRAIN MPL LOT ARE PLAYING INTO THEIR HANDS!
If you all stuck together, got yourselves the minimum licences required for the job, THEN STOPPED THERE, it would be up to the airlines to fund your TR, put you on a CRM/MCC/JOC or whatever other crap they call it this week (which would probably dry up and be done away with, once no flight schools were making money taking an extra £1-2000 off all pilots) and train you in-house to their standards while picking up the tab.
Even better would be to stop paying for everything post-PPL. Now tell me why that wouldn't work?
Contrast this with train driving, a job with similar responsibilities to an airline pilot. Fair play it's not flying, but hear me out. It pays a decent wage once trained (circa £35k+ initially with most UK companies, rising to £50k+), and hear this: YOU ARE PAID WHILE TRAINING. So the rail company pays YOU a salary (around £18-22k), trains you up at cost to them, then employs you with (still listening?!) very agreeable terms and conditions. There is a fairly rigorous selection process, and a small percentage of those who apply off the street make it all the way, but that's how it is. Plus, at the end of it all they get a driver who met all the necessary criteria on their own merit (sadly some people aren't up to it) and has been trained by the company since day one.
In the airline world, you have a stupid system where people keep paying to tick all the boxes and add the ratings, try to make themselves more "employable" by paying for further courses etc and trying to get one over their contemporaries to apply for few jobs where supply far outweighs demand. Buying hours on type and all kinds of nonsense. Also, there is a widespread cancer of people not actually having the basic flying skill, or experience built hard-wired knowledge that comes from working their way up the ladder from stick and rudder flying onto more advanced aircraft with a lot more automation (but that still fly like a real plane if you kick it all out) but have little in the way of manual handling skill, and who aren't encouraged to develop more manual flying skills in the normal line of work.
The industry is knackered, with no immediate sign of improvement, especially here in Europe, and I for one am happy scratching a living flying spamcans and have lost any sort of aspirations I had as a kid towards being an airline pilot. Hopefully more people will see the light and stop sucking up the FTO propaganda and paying thousands, and the boot will be on the other foot and airlines will lose their power over the masses and start having to offer training to prospective employees, and pay them a decent salary to attract the right calibre of pilot.