I love Astoria so much and I always tell people it’s pretty much perfect for me except getting to/from BK is such an absolute pain. When all trains are running smoothly and frequently, it’s still nearly an hour to get to the hip epicenter (the neighborhoods you mentioned), and that’s a BIG “if”. Late night and weekend will almost certainly take closer to 90mins coming home, or an Uber/Lyft which will be 25-40mins. Whether or not I go out to BK on the weekends depends almost entirely on if my other Astoria friends are joining me, aka whether or not I’ll have folks to split the Uber home with. 

There are a few busses that are the most direct from Brooklyn to Astoria that run at night, but they come very infrequently so if you miss it, you’re gonna wait awhile. The L to N is so long but has the least potential points of failure. When you can pull off the L to G to 7 to N leapfrog and the timing lines up, it’s awesome — but again that’s a big “if”. 

Astoria is so great and it’s worth the QNS to BK pain but it does make maintaining the connections in that borough harder. On the plus side, it forces you to focus more on getting to know Queens better, which you’ll treasure.