Yes they do. People deserve to be paid according to the scarcity of their skills, rarity and production. They absolutely deserve to be poor if their life goals are designed around staying poor. Choices have consequences.
There are plenty of people who would love to be RPG designers as such the pay should be very low and I will bet they get tens of thousands of applications for this job. Heck I would love to do it, but I would rather keep my high salary as an aerospace engineer and let WOTC pay someone else to do it for $50k a year and I will play what they design, while having money left over for other things.
Naw, if you pay crap you'll get people with no better choices.
That is fine if the job is seperable and scales (a job where 2 less competent people are as good as or better than 1 more competent person), because paying less and getting more people has better yield.
In jobs that don't scale that way, having plenty of applicants is not the restricting factor. You are competing against alternative careers, not just within the industry.
Having 3x as many less skilled designers doesn't replace 1 more skilled designer.
Now, if you have budget problems, you make do with the cheap enthusiastic supply. But if your problem is, say, capitalizing on a brand that is making 1/3 of your companies profit... your problem is efficiently spending money to leverage that brand.
Masses of lower paid designers become a problem, not a solution. The management costs to handle the resulting content end up destroying any savings from cheaper hires.
You want fewer, higher paid, more skilled designers. Both because the higher pay keeps designers in the career, and because it changes how the management treats and consumes designers.
I mean, you could have warehouses of seperable task workers to support the core of the business. And you can work to make work more seperable and scaling.
But at the scale of D&D at this point, nickle and diming sr game designers would be an idiotic move.
