Concur. I've lived in Rosslyn, Courthouse and Clarendon in that order and I've enjoyed it. Georgetown is a quick walk or bike across the river. DC is a quick metro ride away and you don't have to deal with having a car downtown. On the weekends your that much closer to the outdoors and don't have to deal with traffic leaving and entering DC.

Still though, a metro stop in Georgetown woulda been nice.

I lived in Courthouse for years. Obviously this is an opinion, but I don't view that corridor as a city.

It's a dense suburb with high rises along the corridor. It's metro accessible between Rosslyn, Courthouse, Clarendon and Ballston, but only along the strip. The metro is also so deep in areas and so slow to arrive, that going down and waiting usually takes longer than biking or walking or driving. Anything interesting in the area also requires a car. The corridor itself is barely human scale in terms of distance. Stores are very spaced apart. You can walk minutes and barely leave the alcove of your particular high rise. To me it's the worst of all worlds. Annoying to drive in, but too car centric to be truly walkable and not dense enough to make the metro really make sense. As soon as you leave the main corridor it also becomes single family homes with nothing going on. I will say, biking is a true pleasure though.

While DC as a whole might be less walkable than that corridor, it definitely has a city feel that I think is hard to put into words. I think it has a much more even density of housing, stores, and restaurants that you don't find in newer developments that tend to segregate zoning. It's a much more interesting place to exist in for the average human. It's why I don't think they two areas are interchangeable at all.

I live in NYC and haven’t been to DC in ages, but what is the deal with this station?

https://maps.app.goo.gl/G8SXAuMAZVypHyuKA?g_st=ic

It’s, like, in the middle of a bunch of parking lots? A big part of the catchment area is a highway interchange? How do you walk to this station?

I don't live there, but I'm familiar with Tysons corner (it's an enormous mall serving most of nova). that station probably functions more as a park-and-ride than something you would actually walk to.

I remember being in Tysons on business a few years back and could see across the road to the mall. But I couldn’t just walk there to find dinner because there was literally no way to walk across the road.

I don't disagree with your critiques and I certainly have my own of the area, but I see a lot of that as an argument for why the Arlington corridor is part of DC conceptually. It is highly connected to DC (transit times into DC as low or lower than many intra-DC trips), high density (the entire county is only a bit less population dense than DC itself), and essentials are walkable if a bit inconvenient at times. Arlington would be a bad city if it were isolated, but Arlington is the way it is because it isn't isolated.