I'm a software engineer living in A2 and also recommend moving here. It has a small town feel but has most amenities anyone would need. Comcast provides gigabit internet for $120/mo in some areas of town. There's a great downtown scene with a ton of university students to stimulate intellectual curiosity.

There is a growing tech scene here with companies like Duo (sold for 2bn to cisco), barracuda networks, and a thriving startup scene (farmlogs, trove, spark incubator, etc.).

We have excellent meetups -- at least for javascript (regularly 100 people attend them).

The food here is pretty great considering the size of A2.

The cost of living, however, is quite a bit more expensive than most places in the midwest. Getting an apartment downtown is going to run you close to $1.5-2k.5/mo. There is definitely affordable living here, but you'll have to look further outside the 2mi radius of downtown A2. Purchasing a house in A2 is extremely difficult and fairly expensive.

Also, we are 45 mins away from Detroit, which is making a huge comeback. It has a ton of cultural diversity and some excellent food, things to do.

I see fairly reasonably sized houses in the 200k - 400k range in Ann Arbor. That seems totally fine. What's your experience purchasing?

I grew up in Michigan, and hated it until a few years ago when my sister moved to Grand Rapids. GRR has some of the best veggie/vegan food I've had in the world, a strong arts scene and an equally vibrant underground music scene.

Ann Arbor is also quite fantastic. I study middle-eastern percussion, and Ann Arbor is a hub for my musical world. Every time I visit family in Michigan I take a couple of days to play house parties, go to concerts, take lessons, and jam. The Arabic/Turkish music scene there is very vibrant, and the city itself is unexpectedly diverse for the midwest.

The cost of living in Michigan is lower than in some third world countries. I bought my mother a house in Grand Rapids, in cash, for less than 25% of what it would have cost me for a down-payment on a 750 ft^2 condo in a really bad neighborhood in San Francisco.

The weather, however, is the deal-closer for me. Winters are pretty miserable.

(edited for clarity and punctuation)

Second this. GRR is not too far from AnnArbor, Kalamazoo, BigRapids,Lansing. Which are all college towns. All of them are may be an hour away or two hour tops. GRR has an incredible beer scene,midwestern non-chalance,salaries are not too great, but it is cheap to live there. My buddy used to work for Atomic Object-in GRR and he never had anything bad to say about them.