I can't believe some of this pompous horse manure I'm reading here. The US majors hire just about all their guys from turboprop / RJ / ex mil / bizjet backgrounds. Same with a few other dodgy amateur operators like Cathay, Qantas, Virgin
In fact the exact opposite argument is flying around in Cathay at the moment, I had some beers with one of their checkies a few weeks back, and he was weeping and wailing about how the standards have massively fallen in recent years, since they went away from the policy of recruiting most of their guys from those kind of experienced backgrounds, and more towards hiring local cadets.
Also, it's never been easier these days for a kid to go buy a job and a couple thousand hours with a crappy third world 737/A320 operator, and not learn a bloody thing in that time except how to be a lazy useless SOP cowboy. And I would argue it's much much easier to get away with being lazy and useless in a modern jet as opposed to a turboprop, because 99% of the time the systems on the jet will save you from your own stupidity.
If a guy is still alive and incident free after a few years of turboprop command, then you can at least have some confidence that he knows how to do things like land in a max crosswind, execute a go round at minimums, correctly identify icing conditions and so on. There are plenty of narrowbody jet F/O's out there who still struggle with that stuff believe me.