In rapid succession, the inadequacies of City of Derry airport and the creaking rail link between Derry and Belfast have come in for a well-deserved pasting recently.
A bit of Derry grumbling also focused on the verdict by the latest Bridgestone Guide that when it came to food, Derry was best viewed through the rear window of a car - leagues behind foodie-Belfast in particular, restaurants still mostly stuck in packet-soup land.
One local amenity arguably well ahead of Belfast is Radio Foyle, the BBC's award-winning local station. The summer controversies were gracefully seized on by a magazine programme with the warmth of a small place, but a reach and production team worthy of any full-size city. Presenter Paul McFadden does the rare thing of sparking and then staying out of discussions, serious and light alike. In the Bridgestone conversation he did murmur that Belfast had good restaurants because it had "all the jobs and all the money". Bridgestone editor John McKenna thought there was no mystery. People were heading across the Border and giving their money to restaurants in Donegal.
Some Donegal towns are booming now compared to Derry, the city just over the Border that was once the shopping magnet for the whole northwest and before that the port through which emigrants poured out to the new world. John Hume, its most famous son for decades, who began by preaching self-help but was forced into political action, is off tomorrow to New Brunswick, Canada, with a group devoted to celebrating the contribution there of Irish and Ulster-Scots.
The Hume birthplace itself now has strikingly wealthy suburbs, but the patchiest of economic development. Derry has had much to complain about, and has always complained in style. The lament essentially is that it is deprived of the infrastructure and therefore of the comparative affluence of Belfast.
A city of more city-like dimensions than the small walled town on the Foyle, Belfast justifies its advantages by claiming to be a capital, something half of its own citizens dispute. Derry merely claims to be like nowhere else.
The two towns face into the new era with differences flying. What Derry lacks materially it makes up for in sense of community and informality, the upside of being a village in thin disguise. There is small point in giving yourself airs if most people you meet on the street are likely to be your cousins.
Claustrophobia drives many away, but an equivalent affection for their birthplace will never be shared by as many citizens of Belfast, a place made up of many places with histories that clashed well before the last 40 years.
Waterside unionists and cityside nationalists might glower at each other across the Foyle but share pride in the walls. The relationship with Donegal may have complications but as countless families with Inishowen ancestors attest, it is part of Derry's life-blood on both sides of the river.
How today's situation shakes down will depend on several factors, not least the psychology of coming generations of bright young Derry-born Protestants. Most of their parents may stay fixated on the most blatant change in the landscape. It is certainly hard to assimilate the fact that the city's chief contemporary political representative, sharing the top post in a transformed Stormont with none other than Ian Paisley, is Martin McGuinness.
The McGuinness reputation was made 30 years ago, when he led the IRA while it bombed Derry's commercial centre close to extinction.
But then for many Catholics across the North, Ian Paisley as First Minister is hardly a source of joyous contemplation either.
Protestant flight from Catholic-run Derry to Limavady and the east is not much of a slogan, and no way to live. Martin McGuinness has been local lad made good for a long time.
The IRA's war in Derry was over, at least in the view of many republicans, several years before the first "cessation of military operations" was declared. In the view of many unionists, the reason was clear enough. The IRA would not bomb what its own people now controlled. There was little unionist-owned business left inside the walls and the Guildhall, seat of local government, had changed hands.
The council had become "Derry Council", renamed by the upwardly mobile nationalist majority that relegated "Londonderry". In the early Troubles it was Derry, not Belfast, that drew international attention for its radicals and rhetoric.
Like other places, Derry people resent disrespect from outsiders but are quick to jibe themselves. Some who saw the revolution begin wonder where the radicalism went. Only slightly joking, they mutter that a good few foot soldiers of the civil rights movement have joined the landlord classes.
Others simply want the rich to spend their money at home, and support a few good restaurants.