I have flown into SBA a few times. It is a fine airport and I would love to go there again. LAX handles emergencies on a daily basis. As a new captain at Aircal I had a bomb threat and had to evacuate my B737 at LAX with the slides, since no airstairs showed up when we parked in their bomb evacuation zone. They deal with these emergencies well. I would take the extra few minutes to land there and take advantage of their expertice.
My Miami landing was on 27L, now 27 because of the new runway. MIA has no CAT 3 autoland runways but in an emergency you can land on a normal CAT 1 runway if you deem it necessary. It seemed like a good back up in case cockpit visibility made it difficult to see on landing. It wasn't required so I disconnected everything on short final.
This all happened some time after Swissair 111 crashed near Halifax because of electrical fire. The new procedures for a 2 man crew were simplified to not require a flight engineer so I had modified my procedure a bit to move the first part of the checklist into memory items. Our company had not changed anything and I didn't want to go the way of Swissair using our check list.