Isn't making you head for the door the master plan?
Lets look at the changes so far:
Final Salary vs Career Average. Always going to be a loser on career average especially if you take into account 6 months at Cranwell on New Entrant Rate of Pay which is currently around £14,000. God forbid you should be re-coursed or worse still end up on medical holding flight for any length of time. 6 months of £14k is going to seriously dent the final average whichever way you look at it.
Seniority for degrees. When I joined (and if my maths is right, Evalu8tor must have joined at about the same time) you got credit for your degree back in the form of a jump in Fg Off seniority. You even got an extra year just for being aircrew. My cadetship + 4 years seniority for my degree + 1 year for being aircrew made me a Flt Lt (with corresponding jump in wages) before I knew what I was doing. All this is now gone.
Flying Pay. Time used to start ticking when you got your wings. Now you need to be post OCU. Memory is hazy but I'm pretty sure I was on initial rate all through Valley and must have been knocking on the door of Middle rate when I reached the OCU (those were some long holds!).
Initial commission. PCs were the norm (16/38) with a few SSCs scattered about. Now SSC seems to be the default and you have to be 'selected' to swap to a pension earning commission later on.
All of the above make it much easier (and cheaper) to attract you straight from school, get 12 years out of you then let you go.
The OP claims £16M training cost to the end of OCU. I think that's way over the mark, £4-5M seems closer to a believable number and even than that is arrived at by adding up the cost of everything and diving by the number of graduates.
A better question would be, given that the equipment and bases are already in place, how much extra would it cost to train 1 extra pilot? If this figure is significantly less than the cost to retain the experienced guy past 40 for a 'full career' then you can see why this direction of travel has been taken.
I'm not saying I agree with it but it seems clear to me that those on here pining for the RAF to do more to retain them are barking up the wrong tree. Either you will be happy in the RAF and stay anyway or you'll be looking for greater remuneration and leave at 12 year point under the new system. This, I think, is what manpower plans want.