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Two answer OP's question; poker, like any other profession, pays proportional to effort. If you want to make 100,000 per year, and were gifted with the raw intellect to do it, you could, provided you learned the skills necessary and put in enough quality hours. If you so desperately need someone to tell you that "its impossible to make a decent living at cards," it's probably because you're not a winning player.

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I am not desperately trying to find somebody to tell me it's impossible to make a decent living playing poker. If you read the original thread, my basic hypothesis was merely that I thought that there were probably fewer people "making it" than many people assume, and that a lot of the big names don't win as much in poker as you might think (since almost all the big names supplement their income with tangential things like books, etc.).

Also, I never said I wanted to become a poker professional. In fact, I can guarantee you that the chances of that ever happening are almost zero, considering that I definitely can make more in other pursuits than I would make in poker. I merely wanted people's opinions about how many people out there actually made a good living playing poker. I know I could not do it (nor would I want to), that's never been at issue.