My mother-in-law retired from Michigan to Sun City West, AZ. We visited her several times there. When we started, that's where the newer retirees were going to, preferring it over the older Sun City, AZ. It had very nice facilities and really opened our eyes to what an active retirement lifestyle could be. However, we decided we didn't want to retire to either of those communities for a number of reasons, including:
Surprisingly (to us, anyway) bad air pollution
Quite a high crime rate in the surrounding areas, especially Phoenix
The insanely high summer temperatures (even if it is a "dry" heat", it's still stupid hot)
The lack of green (other than golf courses) - everything was tan or brown
After several years and several visits, we also saw Sun City West start to shut down recreation centers, theaters and the like. It turns out that the developer (Del Webb, if I recall) pulls out entirely when the last house is sold and hands the operation over to the residents. Most retirees don't really want to take on the job of running a retirement community, whether it is small of fairly large.
Years later, we visited The Villages with no intention of retiring here or to anywhere in Florida for that matter. We were living in North Carolina by then and loved it and thought we'd retire to South Carolina (all of the whether, food and location benefits of North Carolina but better taxes for retirees). We decided that The Villages had everything we liked about Sun City West but none of the things we didn't like about it. It also, due it's huge scale of operations, simply had more to offer than Sun City West or any other retirement community we looked at in the Carolinas (or Arizona or Florida for that matter).
For those that prefer the desert, Arizona has a growing number of retirement communities and you might well be as happy at any of them as we are here. There's a place for nearly everybody, somewhere.
Ditto on the comment about being jealous of the OP's having retired fairly young. I retired at 62 and would have loved being able to retire as happily as I did only a decade or so earlier.
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