@blossom, i’ll agree and disagree with different parts of your post.
First, agreed that the “sitting around” thing is simply dumb. Seriously, anyone who knows what’s involved in a PhD program knows that the best thing that can happen to the rare person who actually means that is that they wash out—and the rest are merely doing the humblebrag bit in a really, really obnoxious way.
As for the location part, though, you’d’ve been right a decade or two (depending on the field), but things have gotten worse since then. Even community colleges in less-in-demand locations are finding the ability to pick and choose between applicants for tenure-stream jobs in a lot of fields (and not just fields like modern American literature or modern history, where the job market’s been horrible since sometime in the 1970s)—and the idea, which was probably still valid even in the late 1990s/beginning of this millennium, that one can get an adjunct job and parlay that into a tenure-stream job somewhere in a couple years, is no longer the case, either.