Yes, I will max out all tax-advantaged accounts before making any investments in taxable accounts. I am saving more than 401k limit (53k), IRA limit, and HSA limit per year, so it is necessary to look at taxable accounts. I don't think CA muni bonds are a good idea for me for two reasons. First, I am not in the very highest brackets. My marginal tax rate is 28%+9.3%=37.3%. The top bracket is 39.6%+13.3%+3.8%=56.7%. Additionally, I don't plan to stay in California forever or even necessarily for a long time. So if I move out of state in 5 years, I am no longer getting the state tax benefit.
Focusing on stocks (since at my age, that is where the bulk of my portfolio is), I don't want to change my overall allocation, just place different pieces of it where is most tax advantageous. For this reason, I would like to avoid individual stocks like Berkshire or Markel. The ideal thing would be that someone at Vanguard looks at all the companies in VTSAX and decides that some of those companies are more likely to pay dividends while others are instead likely to grow in market cap (like Berkshire and Markel) or use share buybacks to return capital. And then created two index funds which match this divide. Does this not exist? Or perhaps there are some other Vanguard funds which would approximate this even if it wasn't their design goal.