I honestly love the higher cost of the 5D3 or the 1DX... it does keep these out of the hands of some of these "pros". With more and more soccer moms or GWC ponying up for great gear, the one thing they can't buy is experience. Just because you can post on online somewhere and/or have a website does not instantly make you professional.
Oh, I so wish that the cost of gear would weed out more of the amateurs. Fact is that all too often the guy who's the rankest amateur is often the best equipped photographer on the scene. Case in point from an indoor track meet just last weekend: I and one other lady are working for different school sports information departments and roughly equipped the same (crop bodies with 70-200 2.8's). In walks a guy with a Nikon D3X mounted with a 200mm f/2.0, a lens I would almost literally kill for. (Almost. If it were a Canon.) I chatted with him a bit and learned he was a super nice guy and was just messing around trying to get some pictures of his nephew.
Another case in point: Last fall, at a high school football game between two of the state's highest ranked teams, the only guy on the sidelines with a 400mm 2.8 was not a professional photographer, but an insurance salesman.
These are the individuals that make it harder for working photographers to navigate in today’s market.
Neither of the two guys I mention above were hurting me at all. No skin off my nose if they post photos to Flickr and pass some prints out to family and friends. But one of my college contracts evaporated a couple of years ago because an athlete's father has taken it upon himself to shoot all sports and donate hundreds of jpegs for free. My understanding is the guy is a dentist, so while the contract I used to have was real money to me (equivalent to about four house payments a year), it would probably be chump change to him. The school is not getting my experience or my level of quality, but they have apparently decided the quality sacrifice balances out the cost savings.
Nobody goes to Sears and drops a few grand on a professional tool set and then starts doing auto repair for free, so it kind of blows my mind that anyone would spend thousands on photo equipment and then just start doing photography work for free. Personally, I would have a moral compunction against going out and doing something for free that would be somebody else's livelihood, except in the case of volunteer work for charitable or benevolent organizations or something to help a close friend or family member in need. Am I wrong to feel a bit screwed, not only for myself but my profession, that someone would mess with the market this way, and in so doing condition a private, for profit university that used to pay fair rates for good work to become photography freeloaders?
I suppose it doesn't really matter. That's just the market these days.