Sample size: New York (Brooklyn and Manhattan) and Los Angeles.
FWIW, cooking isn't an interesting side hobby for me: I cook pretty every meal my family eats from scratch, and it's hard enough planning and executing 21 meals a week without dealing with artisinal suppliers.
Compared to the modern supermarket where everything is available all the time it is certainly a pain in the neck. But in exchange you (sometimes) get produce that's so much better than the visually flawless but tasteless items you often get in a supermarket that it doesn't even seem like the same plant.
Farmers markets are not part of a serious urban domestic supply chain where reliability matters. They are for fun, and that is ok! I love picking up a weird jar of flavored honey or some fresh blackberries for snacking. I just wish people would stop suggesting that farmer's markets are some kind of solution to all that ails the urban cook.
I get the urge to go back to simpler times when people spent two hours shopping before spending all day over the stove, but by and large, I think it's silly. We've moved on, and the number of people that turn up unannounced at our home for a warm evening meal tells me that even the degraded produce in markets today is more than sufficient to produce great meals.
The only other problem left at this point is the efficiency equation -- can I think of, buy and then execute on the ingredients faster than it takes for me to drive, get seated, and eat my meal at a restaurant. I am finding the more I do it, the more the answer becomes: yes.
The only time I go to steak places is for business dinners as they often seem one of the defaults for high-endish places to take customers. But I basically never go on my own. They're generally pretty boring and steak is something I can make easily at home. When I go to fancier restaurants I usually have something that would be way too fussy for me to make at home or that I simply couldn't do a good job of.
I live between the Union Square and Abington Square farmers markets in Manhattan.
Delicious food
Great variety
Low prices in season
Friendly farmers
They've made nearly all grocery stores into disappointments. I get over 90% of my food from them and my CSA. Plus I bring my compost there. Because of them I cook nearly everything from scratch, with ingredients picked around 24 hours before I bought them.
Shopping at those farmers markets, and picking up my CSA delivery is the highlight of my week: I can't wait to see what I'm going to love eating.
And I definitely don't want to drag my compost through lower Manhattan.
Vegetables from the farm is how I create meals every day, plus legumes and nuts from the bulk food store, probably 90+% of my calories. I don't buy packaged food. My vegetables come from the farmers market and farm share.
I bring compost through Manhattan because I love living here and the alternative is putting it into landfills, which I'm not willing to do. It means carrying a few pounds a few blocks maybe once a month to where I was going anyway to get vegetables that are more delicious, healthy, and cheap than any alternative.
These are all improvements to my life.
Sometimes I'm feeling like something specific for dinner that may not be in season - and thanks to modern agriculture I can still go to the supermarket and get the ingredients. That's definitely not a need that the farmer's markets can fulfill.
But you absolutely can cook very reasonable dinners with the seasonal ingredients you get at the farmer's markets, and I enjoy doing so frequently. Doing this repeatably and reliably for dinner requires a wider breadth of recipes, but IMO is a skill well worth cultivating for not just nutrition but taste.
Personally, the changing of food with the seasons is IMO one of the great joys of life.
It feels like you're talking past the others in the thread here - many of whom can and do rely on CSAs and farmer's markets for their everyday cooking (and not just "fun treats"). Nobody's saying you must not use supermarkets (I sure do), or that CSAs/farmer's markets are the only way to go, but they are fairly complete sources of ingredients for meals.
You have to go to a "real" farmers market. The best way to tell is check out where all the delivery trucks are and read some of the boxes. If you see "product of California"" or "product of Mexico" on many of the boxes and you are in a farmers market no where near Mexico or California, you are at an outdoor grocery store.
You need to look for local farmer's markets, not the faux-distributor's ones. I think what you need to know about Farmer's Markets is that you must buy (can only buy) in-season produce. While this might disappoint the regular grocery shopper who is used to bad tomatoes in December, to the the chef, its a great delight to be able to pick from only the right season's produce.
It's a shame.
As an aside, it's interesting to see how others introduce new foods to the rotating menu. I'm pretty conservative: cook a new dish and serve it on the side on night T, and if it works, it becomes the main dish on T+1.
What are you thinking expecting major metropolitan areas to be good places for farmers markets?
Although I'm told the one in Seattle is supposedly legendary...