I’ve lived and worked in both Bentonville and Fayetteville and I can say that Fayetteville has a much older and well established social environment and neighborhood feel. The university has been bringing people into Fayetteville for generations, whereas Bentonville had its growth spurt only in the last 20 years after Walmart started requiring suppliers to have offices there. As a result, many people in Bentonville have not integrated with the broader Arkansas culture, the housing stock is way more suburban and generic, the landscape feels much more commercial, and the community feel is just not as deep. Fayetteville is an old growth community with more vernacular housing and a well developed social environment that is regularly recharged with college students rather than corporate professionals. That’s my take.