The fact is, the marketplace is so crowded with material, so many writers are hungry for any attention they can get, that everything works in favor of the producers' trend to get significant option money out of the practicing equation. This trend is very real, particulary when the work at hand is by new writers. There is a lesson to be learned from all this. It is another chapter in the book called Reality 101. This is the way the business works.
Preparation is the lesson of the day for the new screenwriter.
Count it as yet another disadvantage to being a screenwriter, a field where surely writers are less respected than in any other narrative form. If you want to get onto the playing field in today's market, you are going to have to swallow several bitter pills, and this is one of them. Later, when you have credits and belong to the WGA, maybe you can remember your early days and lead a crusade for those newcomers who follow in your footsteps. But more realistically, you might be just another unemployed, experienced screenwriter scrambling to get work before you enter yet another arena of minefields aimed at the screenwriter, the minefield of age discrimination. I tell my students to forget about all this for the time being.