I don't think Florida is a bad place to live if you don't mind much of the year being extremely hot and humid. I grew up there, lived in the Central Florida area for ~22 years. It was a nice place to grow up, but isn't where I'd choose to live.
I'll preface this: I can tolerate heat, but don't like it. Florida doesn't get the insane scorchers the interior gets, but for 6 months of the year it has consistent, day after day after day heat indexes of 95F+, and it doesn't really cool off at night. Humidity is consistently very high. For me personally, I prefer having a break from the heat now and then. For 6 months of the year I was pretty much inside a climate controlled box 95% of the time, very much like most people in the north deal with winters. For ~3 months I had the windows open, and for the other transitional ~3 months it was nice to be outside, but I still couldn't sleep in the heat. I spend more days with the windows open and/or outdoors in Vermont, even with the very long and cold winters. YMMV.
Regarding bugs and reptiles, when I first moved to Vermont, I thought people were suicidal when they would go walking into marshes or tall grass, because in Florida, that's a good way to die. Bugs and reptiles aren't really a problem if you're "where you're supposed to be", but you really don't want to go crashing through the bushes or anywhere near standing water that isn't a beach. Mosquitoes are bad in most places after dark, so if you can get a place with a screened in porch, you'll thank me. But, you're probably already accustomed to this.
There's a lot to do in Tampa and St Pete. I hear it's a great place to live for an extrovert. My brother is, and still lives in the area.
These probably aren't important to you from how you've described things, but what I can say by contrast is that when I moved up north, my pace of life slowed down, and my blood pressure dropped. I make more money and work less. I now have a vegetable garden which isn't eaten by bugs or destroyed by heat and sunlight, and it's normal for people to have chickens in their front yard even in "the city". Density of people is far lower, there are never any crowds. My neighbors are (on average) less materialistic and superficial, though they have their own set of problems. I feel safe enough to leave my door unlocked at night, and the keys in my car. I'm 20 minutes from work, and 20 minutes from some of the best mountain hiking in the eastern US. There's virtually no traffic, whereas CFL was often a traffic nightmare. Billboards are illegal here, and most who visit comment on the lack of ads covering everything. There's a lot less concrete and a lot more grass. The color of things is different. Florida is a sort of muted green-brown year-round, whereas here spring and summer are brilliant green, autumn is red-orange-yellow, and winter is white and blue.
CFL has more restaurants, more concerts, more art exhibits, theme parks, zoos, shopping malls and hundreds of miles of beaches, but the feeling of being in an endless crowded suburb wasn't my choice of lifestyle, and the landscape was (subjectively) considerably less beautiful.
