I do agree with you about Liberty City and North Miami. Those are some of the worst ghettos in the country.
If I had to live in Florida again, I could tolerate Coral Gables/South Miami, Palm Beach (the town, NOT the rest of the county), and even parts of the Panhandle along the coast.
Miami has beautiful women that put up with Yankees, something Central Florida lacks. 8^]
I have been to all the places that you speak about, and while I don't think Central Florida is all that impressive a place any more, it's certainly not as disparate as Miami is in that Orlando doesn't have the kind of dumps Miami does. Orlando is a better average, though, and has plenty of high end neighborhoods that put the noveau riche money in Miami to shame. Maybe you've never been to any place out of Winter Park that you liked in the Orange County area, but the Lake Eola area is really nice. So are Celebration, Lake Nona, Maitland, Lake Tibet, and Windermere. So is Isleworth, which is one of the "celebrity capitals" of the U.S. And I think saying that those few areas of Miami "blow OC away" is going overboard, when you consider that even Miami's beaches are a place normal people fear to tread at night, while Orlando's DOWNTOWN is a touristy area people hang out in to the wee hours. You stretch it to call Key Biscayne and Coral Gables Miami, too, because the people that live there generally never go INTO Miami--or out of Key Biscayne or Coral Gables, period.
Now, I would never live in that suburban hell, either, and I would prefer to go back to South Florida closer to Islamorada or some other place that cannot be developed any more than it is (Key Largo is pretty close to that, and I'd like to end up there). But I won't say that generally, Miami is a better place to live than Orlando, unless your definition of paradise is purely urban. On that level, Miami is the top city in Florida.
I live in Seminole County, which has a massive GOP lean. Coming from Boston, it's refreshing.