To use your analogy, it’s more like living in a city where the most-attractive person once came in 3rd in an ugliness competition, and also everyone has unpleasant personalities. It’s less that you don’t have any of the best options available, and more that you don’t have any that are better than “still fairly bad”. You visit a buddy few couple states over, rave about how wonderful and pretty all the locals are, and your buddy’s like “dude wtf we’re infamously the ugliest town in this state, and the reputation is deserved, I need you to say these things to some of my local pals so they can have a good laugh”.
Why bother, indeed.
I'm guessing I probably have (by your definition), as a matter of fact.
But what exactly is a "really bad outdoors situation" anyway?
Really bad.
That's "why bother with romance when you almost certainly won't be with one of the 100 most attractive people in the world" logic.