Flat places are boring. Hills are nice. There are lots of sports where having some hills is more or less necessary. Who likes to go hiking in the corn fields? Grapes for wine are best grown on hills. Thus, SV (and California in general, outside of the valley) is better.

Subjective? Entirely.

But probably true for more people than those who absolutely love monotonous flat places. In terms of voting with their feet, SV beats the rust belt "hands down". If someone simply doesn't care about having some hills or mountains, than perhaps that's not an advantage for them in SV. But the climate is still quite nice, as well as access to the ocean, for some people.

I actually wouldn't want to go back there, but it's got a lot of attractive things.