I've lived quite a few places all over the US, Most of my time being spent in California, Texas, Utah and Colorado. But I've also lived in Florida, Oklahoma, Washington, Arizona, New Mexico, an Louisiana. So I've got some perspective. Not liking cold and wet eliminates Utah/Colorado and the best parts of New Mexico since they all get snow, a caveat of the south is the humidity is rather strong, so the wetness might still be there. Since you are thinking about going to the south and since I'm most familiar with Texas I'll explain about that.
I think most of the US is can be disappointing in different ways, but it's still mostly divided between City, Suburbs and Rural lifestyle. A prevailing problem is how most cities are designed as car first, this goes back to lobbying in the 50s-Today but its enough to say that the only places with good walkability and public transportation are large cities in mostly progressive areas.
As an example Southern California Vs Texas. Cali has worse traffic and more people, but has better public transportation (though its still not great compared to other countries), while Texas has lots of toll roads, near the highways instead of loading ramps they have frontage roads (which to me feels like a solution optimized for about 30% of what the population is), has almost no public transportation and has somehow made their cities even less walkable than nearly anywhere else I've ever been (only certain districts are walkable, usually places like a downtown or places to bar crawl). The sprawl in the south is even more pronounced than almost anywhere else, the cities are not condensed at all, The Dallas-FortWorth area is a good example, it's probably easier to call it a region of 10-20 cities than to call it a city area, just the way it's designed, they are all kinda separated districts that don't mix with each other, don't connect properly.
Housing is expensive anywhere the closer to a city you get, it's slightly cheaper in Texas than California, but if you live in the middle of nowhere in Cali, and the middle of nowhere in Texas it is comparable.
The rest of the south I've visited or spent time in, once you get away from the cities there is a kind of weighty feeling there, almost despair, it's palpable. I think it comes from centuries of poverty and how nothing changes except prices going up. The weather is nice but the culture, lack of resources, lack of opportunities and lack of networks almost always make it a negative to be there.
The positives are the food is tasty, the music is good, Atlanta is doing some cool stuff in entertainment and AI and Miami is also doing some interesting stuff in Finance and Stocks, Austin has a fun culture of music + tech + weirdness, San Antonio actually could become a place of tech manufacturing if they play their cards right. There are some fun places to go fishing too. Thats about it really. I've found most of the south to on the whole be a rather unpleasant place.