How important is location?

I'm going to be spending pretty  much all weekend on grad school stuff, wheeee.

Right now, I've got 4 solid lines of communication open to different potential advisors, and I'll be applying to each of their schools.  Two of them I'm really excited about, and the other two have a lot of potential (younger faculty members in programs I don't know as much about yet).  One of them I would never have found/contacted, but that he's involved in the large research projects going on at the place I work at, and he approached me.  But he's a crazy cool guy, very energetic and sharp.

Problems:

- I have another ~4 people that I had been considering contacting.  And I really feel like I shouldn't apply to more than 5, maybe maybe 6, places.  Otherwise it's just too much work, and too much time spent interviewing/traveling, with the prospect of having to make even more difficult choices.  How to choose the last several people to contact?  Gulp.  I hate striking up conversations and then turning people down.  And right now I'm running a greater than 80% success rate for inquiry emails (# of positive responses encouraging me to apply vs. total number of emails sent).  Another reason for not applying to too many schools is that I'm pretty confident that I will be admitted everywhere I apply (maybe I shouldn't be, but I feel good about it).  That, and I have some guilt at the thought that if I apply and am accepted to a lot of places, then I'm getting in the way of other really awesome people who would have liked the slots.  Ugh.

- There are one or two people who do really awesome work, related to what I do, in some really good institutions.  But, the schools are in parts of the country that I don't really want to live in.  I feel like this is probably a bad bias, but so far I haven't been able to overcome it.  Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Back to the grind stone.