If the AFL wanted to improve the perception of umpires they wouldn’t pretend they never made mistakes (or at least very rarely admit they stuffed things). Players and coaches are under much more pressure and there’s no ‘don’t mention the war’ with them. The media get things wrong, they get called out.
I’m happy for the AFL to bump the pay and go professional, but include transparency as part of it. If a player gets dropped to the reserves the coaches will say they need to work on X, Y or Z. If an umpire puts in a few poor games, the umpires boss should say ‘<X> is going back to the VFL/WAFL/SANFL to work on their calls of <Y>’. Sure at first there’d be some ‘That cost us the game!’, but we already get that. I’d rather an organisation that isn’t afraid to go ‘Hmm, West Coast, Adelaide and Geelong get a much higher number of frees at home, regardless of performance, let’s look at this without assuming our umpires are perfect and it’s just a statistical fluke’.