What are some better options in CA?

Depends what you're looking for, CA is a ginormous state with basically anything you fancy on the menu. Rural, urban, mountainous, coastal, desert, agricultural, it's all over the place.

It should simply be obvious that judging the state from a narrow sampling of life in San Jose is an extreme case of wearing the SV rat-race blinders and utterly failing to take advantage of what the region has to offer.