I hear you!!!
Our son was near the Cloisters in Harlem, and it may be that you didn't see the parts of Harlem he knows and love. "The Harlem Renaissance" of the 1920s included jazz as well as art, and that's his love. Astoria? He hasn't lived there yet but he's tried Brooklyn and Manhattan, a year of sub-letting and apartment-hopping and getting to know New York. An old city (for America) with rich history and great architecture and the Best-in-the-Nation for so many things from food to music to shopping.
I'm not surprised you found traffic better than expected - you used to drive a big rig as a trucker, right? OMG, I cannot even parallel park a car. And the quick reflexes to change lanes and dodge those lane-changers who didn't see you: that's where ADHD ought to come in handy, but not my version of ADHD.
I'm so glad you have had good experiences in other places and that you earnestly seeking to relocate. The place you live may have the reputation of being the worst rural America has to "offer," but having read about hundreds of cold cases and animal abuse, murders and drug traffickers, and human trafficking in my own backyard (or within a few miles of it), I can assure you the Midwest is not all that much better than Appalachia! You may lay claim to living in the "worst" of it, and I do not dispute that. Not at all. I'm grateful that for all the mean, petty, vicious, or merely ignorant or unkind people there are, MOST people are not as bad as all that. Statistics are unreliable at determining how mean people can be and where the mean people congregate the most. It's kinda like the degrees of tragedy: the loss of a loved one is so horrible, it doesn't matter if it could have been worse; bad is bad. Cancer usually gives people time to say goodbye and get their affairs in order, whereas sudden, unexpected deaths leave chaos and shock as well as the usual grief. Losing a loved one to sickness or a car wreck is a whole different kind of loss than having some amoral a^^hole kill your loved one.
I love @crescendoofpeace - "I find kindness and compassion wherever I go" - and can only hope that the human species will evolve more people like her and weed out the selfish SOBs, but survival of the fittest tends to favor the selfish. Then again... long term... George C. Williams's book Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966) and Dawkins's The Selfish Gene would suggest that altrusim and cooperation do serve the perpetuation of the species, but I'll stop now. This comment box is full enough.
Get thee to a city asap, Rhonda! (Eh. Trying to channel the lyrical sound of Hamlet's "Get thee to a nunnery," but it fell flat.)