My wife and I did the Lifestyle Preview this last Summer. She was also more dubious than I was initially, so we asked a lot of people who live there what they thought... and you guessed it... every single person we talked to loved the place. We actually did wonder out loud if there was some sort of "happy juice" in the water!
Then we went to play golf (she had only been out once or twice before in her lifetime) and now she has her own set of clubs, and can not wait to retire and get back there.
I'm sure this is no help at all if you are looking for some balance, but that's our story.
P.S. We came at this question a little differently, so you might like to read some of the replies when we asked "What would you do differently if you had it to do all over again?" in this thread:
If I had it to do all over again...