I know for a fact that there were Marvel writers in the past several years on mid and lower tier books still working day jobs. And there was the whole "recruiting artists from tumblr" thing years back. Let's just say you get what you pay for. I'd hate to see DC go down that path, as we saw some really, genuinely terrible output from Marvel with those kinds of policies in place. Although I do think there's a way to get cheaper and newer talent with scraping the bottom of the barrel.
That said, it definitely seems like they're going to be shedding some top heavy creator contracts.