Massachusetts...What's the deal with this place? (13)

Massachusetts has a lot of drawbacks- It is unbelievably expensive to live here. The weather is awful too. I find that the people here are fine. I like people in MA.
A lot of what bothers people about this state is a result of the peculiarities of Massachusetts' politics and culture. Here are some of the ideas currently governing much of the state.
(1) Smoking is one of the worst crimes on earth
(2) Anyone who owns a gun has lost all humanity, and gone totally over to the dark side. The 2nd Amendment has been basically abolished in MA.
(3) Every job, no matter how small, must be done by a high-priced specialist. I mow my own lawn and paint my own house, even repair my roof. Each bit of work I do is met by dark warnings of what horrible things will befall me if I "fail to hire a professional"
(4) In the rest of the country, if beavers flood your land, you kill them. If you find a porcupine eating your vegetables, you kill him. Here the Animal Rights people rule, so if you kill these pests, you have to take care not to get caught.
(5) No anti-Catholic sentiment is too extreme. If you accidently reveal that you went to mass, you are met with insults about p*dophile priests. The people who were born Catholic are the worst offenders here.
(6) You mostly can't buy beer in convenience stores and supermarkets.
(7) The people are surprisingly parochial and provincial in their outlook. I have a strong Western Mass accent, basically a slightly mid-western sounding upstate New York accent, and people often ask me if I am from the south.
(8) 75% of all college students in the Us attend state colleges, but in Mass, they act as if state colleges are for dummies only.
(9) Feminism rules here. It has its good and bad points. One good point is that women don't always instantly expect you to go broke picking up the tab for eveything,and work 14 hours a day so they can stay home and watch All My Children etc.

MA is too expensive. A lot of the high cost of everything in MA is due to ferociously strict zoning restrictions which make everything expensive. You have very few mobile homes. You see few large apartment buildings, other than luxury apartments or elderly housing. You certainly don't see large apartment buildings with inexpensive apartments filled with middle-class people, the way you do in a lot of the country. A lot of towns have minimum lot sizes.
In recent years, it has been difficult to get approval to build anything in many places except large single-family homes, retail stores, and offices. It is hard to get approval to build any of these often useful things- apartment buildings, factories, landfills, junkyards, public transportation.