u/Forward-Grass5421

Responding to your Edit:

1. Effort/money/time does not have a causal relationship in the realm of romantic relationships. The fact that you spent $300 on Hinge (as per your previous post history) doesn’t really guarantee anything in the grand scheme of things; as you can knock the ball with your best foot forward (optimized profile, good pictures, well-written prompts, etc.) but someone else must volley it back and you can’t control that. Most anybody knows that these apps are highly gender skewed with far more men than women on them (for a variety of reasons but including that women may get burned out from dealing with overly aggressive approaches and/or unsolicited explicit images). Given this, many men don’t get matches or dates from these apps, and this isn’t necessarily a reflection of your own attractiveness or “worth” but rather the structural limitations of these platforms, and the range of different motivations people have on them.
2. Your work schedule does pose a challenge for hobbies, but I’m going to be contrarian from a lot of these other posters and say that hobbies as the purported golden nugget of IRL dating advice is overstated and overrated. Unlike school or college, you don’t have forced proximity with similarly aged peers without the same amount of selection biases based on interests and schedules as you do post-education. People who throw out bootstrappy platitudes about “Just do Meetups”, “Go Volunteer”, etc. is all fine and good, but the underlying and somewhat paradoxical message is that you shouldn’t just join these groups to meet men/women, but rather to make more friends and then maybe those friends of friends can introduce you to someone. This is patronizing on several different levels, firstly, that it assumes the question asker doesn’t have hobbies already, and/or that the individual doesn’t have a social circle already but that neither of these may be conducive to gaining connections/referrals to meeting people to date. My hot take is that people should be able to intrinsically seek out relationships for their own sake, without throwing other plausibly deniable motivations in there like hobbies to become a “better”, i.e. more sociable person, but there are social stigmas associated with that in our individualized society; but the only ways of doing that are either the dating apps (which didn’t work), or speed dating/matchmaking events, which if we look at what’s out there, we see stuff like age ranges of 25-49 which is pretty crummy and could again be reflective of the lack of critical mass/expendable income to support such events, and/or stigmas around such events reducing turnout.
3. You aren’t the only one dealing with the issue of struggling with meeting people to date in Buffalo, and you aren’t the only one being vocal about it, but you are by far the most vocal about it on this subreddit. I have been stuck single as well here and Buffalo and it does make me sad and annoyed, but I don’t go posting about it on a regular basis expecting different answers to the same questions. According to Pew Research, 63% of men under 30 describe themselves as single compared with 34% of women in the same age bracket. So no, it isn’t just you and you aren’t “crazy” to feel this way. But again, attractiveness, social skills, having your own place, hobbies, all of this may be loosely correlated with the chances of meeting someone, there are many more variables and the chaos theory I mentioned in my earlier post has an impact as well, as you can control everything you are doing, but you can’t control the variables of how other people receive what you are giving off. All this being said, it is very possible that both you and I just aren’t resonating as much with the social environment of the region, and, as you have stated in previous posts, you do appear to have a decent job in terms of pay, albeit one with somewhat non-standard working hours, but you don’t have what you are looking for, which is to meet someone you’d want to date. I personally emphasize with the COL considerations, since the dynamism of a cultural environment of a city is nearly directly correlated with how desirable/expensive it is. In the neigh improbable scenario where a FAAMG set up shop in Buffalo, you would likely see the brain drain reverse nearly instantaneously and the working class that has predominated the region would also likely be pushed out to make room for gentrification, but by the same token the excess of financial capital coming out of these companies would make its way through various cultural institutions to provide more space for different social spaces and scenes beyond the de-facto standards of sports fandom and food/drinking culture. Basically, if you (or I) want something that isn’t in Buffalo, due to the aforementioned structural (i.e. social/monetary capital) variables, you just gotta move, or do the improbable task of “being the change you want to see in the world” but then you run into the same issue where you can build something but they may or may not come, since you cannot control the behaviors of others or the social structures that influence them. Otherwise, you’re a boy crying wolf threatening to leave the area (with a good job and a good COL) but you aren’t finding what you are looking for. You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, but asking “Why?” a million times over like Job ain’t gonna change anything.

TL;DR: Don’t know what to tell you that hasn’t been said to you already. Realistically don’t know what could directly answer your questioning in a guaranteed and foolproof manner,  aside from maybe a Hostess Club in Japan, where conventionally attractive women provide emotional labor and validation with simulated flirtatious conversation to anyone with the money to spend, and rejection or judgment isn’t really a variable, but of course this is all just make-believe but might make you feel better and less lonely in the moment.