Even Jon Skeet!??! He's guaranteed a job ;-)
But you're disregarding the fact that most of us do this for fun , yep we enjoy answering the questions. Sometimes I learn the material better by answering the question, even if it's an easy question. I might even retain it better than the person I was helping.
But yes, I generally empathize. Is it sad that some lazy kid can sometimes post a two-liner and have an expert deliver $200.00 of value? In a way, yeah .. it is.
We have had dozens of posts that either directly or indirectly try to chip away at this issue. Invariably, the consensus is that things work fine. And I think I agree. We have to sacrifice some quality, but things are working superbly. c'est la vie!
A long time ago when I was a dew-eyed youngster, I tried something tangentially related - Proposal: after 4 downvotes within first minute, prevent anyone from answering ; admittedly it's way too crazy of an idea
Also see: Can we prevent some of the low-quality questions from entering our system?
and
What drives me away from here
I think that gradually we'll get better at this issue. There will be some AI used eventually. Moderation is pretty good overall. A lot of times, when someone comments quickly with "where's your effort?" then others also follow suit, and nobody answers it. But sometimes people compete to answer it. It all depends, and sometimes a user gets lucky I guess.
"[...] quality [...] gone down hill [...]"
- That's definitely a topic for Meta, and constructive suggestions to improve the community are always welcome. I'll admit this system isn't perfect, but it's pretty darn good. Perhaps the noise to signal ratio has increased over time, but that's to be expected isn't it? We're seeing a lot of bad questions, but we're also seeing a faster rate of questions, so do the numbers support the observation? As for the overall question, I don't think quality developers are at risk because of this site.