I was having a similar conversation today with a friend from back in high school who is a pilot in a charter airline.
I was asking his opinion about all the automation that exists and how in many accidents the subsequent investigation came up with pilots focusing all their attention on getting the automatic systems back online, instead of focusing on flying the aircraft first and foremost.
Let's just say he's not very appreciative of the existing trend. He told me he's glad that while flying a jet he still flies a smaller plane that is hand-flown for much of the flight and there are many people who really are in it because they like it.
He also said that a lot of people just get into it because it's a well-paying carreer that their parents can subsidize before them landing their first job. According to him, it's mostly this part of the demographic that tends to aim for landing a first job at a major airline in a big jet and a lot of them tend to end up being more of a systems monitoring agent than a pilot after a while.
I think this is because of the way aviation is in Europe. In areas of the world like Canada, Alaska, Australia or Africa, conditions and geography make smaller aircraft very useful. A sizable portion of pilots tend to get valuable stick time in bush-flying conditions, flying smaller aircraft with less sophisticated systems and not much in the way of automation. These guys really are in the driver's seat and they rack up not only a good amount of hours, but hours logged in diverse conditions and mostly under their direct control.
However, Europe is mostly about the big jets and in all fairness, it seems that it doesn't make sense for a new pilot to pursue a career that will start in smaller airframes and work up from that, simply because there's not enough demand for this kind of flying to create the needed jobs that will absorb pilots willing to start off small and work up from there.
I don't know how things are in terms of cargo airlines, but as far as passengers go it seems to be a case of big jets mostly with everything that entails for building pilot habits when a 25 year old is placed into a highly automated cockpit straight out of flight school.
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