I am impressed with your knowledge of the era of Patti Paige and Arthur Godfrey.
I wonder whether the consequences were unintentional or sought. A theme of the time ("Peyton Place", for example) was the stiffling conformism of small town life, of a world where reputations were set in concrete, and the hypocrisy it bred. The tyranny of Miss Grundy. Moving to the new suburbs, away from the relatives, to a place where nobody knew you, was shaking off the old patterns, reinventing yourself. There was freedom in that and a new privacy where nobody lived above or below or near enough to hear your conversations. You could choose precisely how much contact you wanted with your neighbors. You were physically moving yourself to a place where "what the neighbors will say" no longer is of any importance because they are mostly strangers to you. In an extended family, a divorce would be a civil war. In a nuclear family there is a limited societal ripple effect.
The move to the nuclear family, to get the inlaws and cousins and grandparents out of your hair and out of your business was chosen. It was just one step further to the age of individual autonomy in the 60's and 70's.
An interesting point you made about gays and empty nesters gentrifying urban America. Crime has made cities child hostile and good urban public schools are few and far between. A point that Jane Jacobs made is that bohemians look for cheap places to live, but because they have excellent taste and are fun to be around, the area they choose swiftly appreciates in value.
I don't think they were intentional on most peoples' part. Personally, I think it all started to fall apart not after WW II, but after WW I, especially in the cities. WW I brought the income tax, and with it the inner cities (where the rich people lived) began to fall apart. In older cities, the brownstones and Queen Annes were carved up for rooming houses to accommodate war workers. Middle- and lower-middle-class women (as opposed to poor women) went to work en masse in WW I. Getting a war work job was a major means for single young people to leave their hometowns.
The literary attack on the small town didn't begin in the '50s; it began in the 1920s (i.e. Sinclair Lewis's Main Street and Babbitt.)
Another good source for small town dissatisfaction is the biography of Rose Wilder Lane, "The Ghost in the Little House." Lane was the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the "real" author of the Little House books (she wrote them from her mother's notes.) Lane grew up in Mansfield, MO at the turn of the century and utterly loathed & despised it. At age 15 she fled to Kansas City, got work as a telegraph operator, and a few years later wound up in Greenwich Village, where she lived as a Bohemian throughout the war. After WW I she flirted with communism and then underwent a radical change to libertarian/conservatism. What interested me, though, was her hatred of the stifling atmosphere of Mansfield at a time most conservatives would deem "idyllic."
The rise of the "women's magazine" in the 1920s provided a forum for all kinds of feminine "discontents." The 1920s also brought a huge displacement of agricultural workers, many of them women, as people left farms in droves (a process that would be finished during the Great Depression.)
Female dissatisfaction was made concrete when Prohibition was enacted (after years of political work by women getting prohibition on the *state* level.) The sheer political force of women - even when they lacked the suffrage - resulted in women's voting within a few years of the ratification of Prohibition.
IOW, it's silly to idealize the "nifty fifties" and blame everything on the feminists and hippies of the 1960s.