The issue I come across is that most people (myself included) cannot do a decent number of such longer trips to stay current.
So one needs to do regular local pop-ups, and having to drive say an hour to the airport has a very corrosive effect on one's enjoyment of flying.
Also local flights are the best way to stay current on instruments, because one can just drill into the nearest cloud layer (Class G) and practice procedures around some real or imaginary navaid. When flying to some airport for real, one tends to use automatics to the maximum, because ATC tend to expect accurate flying.