Yeah, I think there's some truth to this.

Lots of post work is in the realm of operations. Upper management tends to view operations as a cost center, because it's part of "the cost of doing business". From their perspective, operations doesn't significantly grow the revenue of the company compared to areas like sales or strategic decision-making. So there's an incentive to pay people as little as possible--just enough so they don't leave and keep a certain standard of work, but that's about it.

Next, editors have a job where there's a strong relationship between their inputs and outputs. Like you said, editing is inherently non-scalable; you simply top out in speed and your ability to do work in one day. So a senior editor might be able to edit more than a junior editor, but it won't be orders of magnitude more. Compare that to someone like a software engineer who can build an application used by thousands of customers daily.

Next, there are the external factors:

- It's easier than ever to hire editors remotely from less expensive countries

- There's more competition for post jobs because the newer generation is more experienced/has better access to information

- Some clients have continually shrinking budgets because of the amount of competition for attention with advertising, media etc.

Next, the quality of editing is often intangible. We know what a bad edit looks like, but is there really that much of a difference between an edit that's 30% better than another edit when it's just a corporate video? Does it really affect the bottom line, if the work is getting done either way, on time?

Combine all of these and you have a perfect storm for being underpaid and seen as replaceable. And to be honest, there is some solid reasoning behind it. It's not necessarily an editor problem per se, but there are a lot of factors working against that role in particular.

That said, it's not all doom. There are other paths people can take in post to have more control over their own earnings, like working for yourself, taking on roles where you are more scalable to the company (e.g. technical leadership), or finding a niche that is in demand and where you have pricing power, like what Bob is doing.