WH;
Paying flight crews what any highly-skilled professional is paid does not make for "safer" operations.
What paying well does do however is attract those with the passion, the capacity, the talent, the discipline, and the resources to put into such a profession.
Our profession must compete with other professions which require similar capabilities from their new candidates and entrants. The medical and engineering professions are closely related to the profession of airline pilot in that they all have great capability to do real harm when not done well.
Although some may argue the case, the legal, education and dentistry professions require similar capabilities but do not have the same risks tightly-associated with poor work by the incapable or the incompetent.
I am by no means convinced that the MCP license and cadet programs are the answer. Though it may be effective on the surface, cookie-cutter thinking isn't a survival tool in aviation, it is a counter-liability tool first. Standards have degraded because most of the original problems associated with high-risk and high accident rates have been conquered. The naive thinking is that less skill is required thereby. Aviation is disproving that belief. After the dramatic drops in fatal accident rates and hull losses in the 50s, 60s and early 70s, the accident rate today remains steady though extremely low. The argument has been that if the percentage remains the same, then an increase in traffic is going to increase the number of fatal accidents and that isn't good enough.
Some companies are sufficiently enlightened to start flight crew remuneration back up to previous levels to attract a still-dwindling pool of suitable aircrew candidates. Others are going to have to settle for second-best and worse, unless the profession is made more attractive to those who would take their skills, talent and intelligence elsewhere.