I learned early on not to take something I loved and turn it into a job, so I don’t have a dog in this fight. However …
One would think that there is plenty of data relating to age-related accident rates in all sorts of commercial activities, from OTR trucking to cardiac surgery, that would address this issue. It’s patently obvious that FAA age-related limitations are arbitrary, or at best statistical derivations, that by definition are invalid for any particular professional pilot. Primarily, they are easy criteria for a government agency to codify into regulation.
My aircraft (SEL, SEH) have few “life-limited” components, with precise hours at which they must be replaced. The vast majority of them are “on condition”, as determined by regular inspection. Even their most problematic component, the “nut behind the stick”, is an “on-condition” part, whose limit is now “inspected” by the medical professional most familiar with it.
Furthermore, an even more dispassionate group is already applying (albeit crudely) a complex statistical analysis of the danger that an older pilot might pose: the insurance industry. Population statistics are a poor predictor of risk for a particular pilot, but better than a number that someone pulled out of their nether region decades ago. It’s high time we made commercial pilots an “on condition” component.