A lot of it is me just being a bitter person. It was a really good place in the 90s. Like Scoresby said, "It's all growing so don't expect it to stay the same". Austin for me was always a "hidden gem". It had an amazing culture, great people, and really really fun activities that were fairly easy to get to. Traffic kinda sucked from time to time but nothing even remotely what it is today. You could get into the trail of lights at Zilker with just a 5 minute wait in line, and do any of the really fun things that exist today with minimal effort. Today, it takes forever to get anywhere - I35 is a parking lot even on Sundays, the city of full of hipsters, the governance completely blows, and all of the fun activities are no longer local and are much more corporatized.
It's like the expression "Keep Austin Weird". They don't use that anymore, because it distracts from tourism, etc. But that's how it was in the 90s, it was just a weird, unusual yet highly fun place to be.
A lot of it is bitter though, I'm sure. I still love central texas in general, I just cannot stand the city proper any longer.