[fapjacks]

Maybe, but I've lived in those places you mentioned (except the east coast cities) and the problem is stifling in Austin. I'm originally from a small, liberal college town in a conservative plains state which in the 80s might have been a great twin city for Austin, if somewhat smaller. So I have some insight into what it "should" be like when people describe how cool Austin is, or how cool people have heard Austin is (because a lot of Austin's reputation is propagated by total strangers). And Austin simply isn't like that, anymore. All of the reasons that people love Austin are actually nowadays being manufactured by outsiders. The plastic, false reality of those qualities is palpable and easy to spot when you're there. There are a few secrets and a few items of local flavor which were still sort of genuinely "Austin" but even when I lived there more than five years ago, they were being inundated by outsiders as "best kept secrets" and diluted.

Having lived in most of the places you mention above, I can say definitively that Austin is experiencing this problem the worst among the "boom cities" by orders of magnitude. I'm guessing it's because of the proportion of recent transplants to "original Austinites". Austin was a small city in Texas in the 80s! ZERO of your boom cities were anything like that so recently. And it's worst among your examples not only because there are actually so few people proportionally who lived in Austin since it was actually cool, but compounded by the fact that a lot of those Austinites are leaving Austin for the surrounding countryside (or wherever).