“Every decision we made here was about quality of life, not yield per acre.”
Most subdivisions start with one question, which is how many lots can we fit. It is not a dishonest question. It is just the one that decides everything after it, and once it is answered the rest of the decisions make themselves. Lot sizes come down. Roads get narrower. The shared ground becomes whatever is left over after the sellable pieces are drawn.
We started somewhere else, and the ground shows it. Parcels sized for actual privacy, with room for a shop and room for animals. Twenty acres set aside as common open space, not as leftover. Infrastructure put in so the land is livable rather than only ownable.
That last distinction is the one I would defend hardest. Plenty of acreage in this corridor is ownable. You can buy five acres tomorrow. Then you drill, and you haul, and you run a generator, and you negotiate with a road board every February about a plow. The land was never the hard part out here. Everything attached to it was.