Partnership is pretty much useless now unless you have millions of views per day. There are to many networks out there that will offer a (Banner) partnership to anyone one. I've seen 100's of full partnered channels with only a couple of hundred subs and a few thousand views.
All of these tiny channels becoming partnered massively decreases the amount of money an advertiser is willing to spend on advertising on videos. The rapid growth of these tiny channels getting (Banner) partnership has had an effect on the medium size channels that were once making a decent amount of money.
The chance of making a living of YouTube is rapidly decreasing. You would have to be very naive to think otherwise. (Or just stupid)