Hoping not to turn this into the @LSLguy show … If anyone is offended by this occupational stuff, just ask and I’ll shut up.
San Diego is not so bad as it once was. They raised the approach path so you’re not skimming the buildings quite so much as before. Modern airplanes are also rather more capable than 1960s models.
Different places have different challenges. The various ski resorts in the Rockies are generally the ones where small airports, short-ish runways, high altitude, bad weather, and nearby terrain mean any buffoonery is rapidly fatal. Most folks are less than fully comfortable in that arena. San Diego is a doddle compared to Eagle/Vail, Hayden, Aspen, Gunnison, or Montrose to name a few I’ve personally operated through. There are certainly more in that vein up in the Rockies. As the airplanes have gotten more sophisticated, the feeling of playing Blind Man’s bluff with nearby peaks has gotten a lot less. The Braille method sucks for those things.
Personally, I find LGA & DCA to be unacceptably stupid ideas. The total system safety is seriously degraded there by short runways, packed taxiways, high traffic levels, often crap weather, and difficult arrivals and departures optimized for noise impact, not safety. But unlike the low-traffic Mountain West airports, we’re landing and taking off 180-ish people from both those places every single minute all day and much of the night. The collective risk exposure is tremendous and unwarranted.
John Wayne / Orange County and Burbank in greater Los Angles, plus Key West, Florida are three more much too small airports with jetliners crammed in. But given their much smaller volume than DCA & LGA, no convoluted flight paths and vastly better weather, the collective risk is much less.
If I was Emperor we’d close them all to anything bigger / faster than a turboprop. Those places belong on the ash heap of at least major airline history.
Ha! I wish!
Senior reserve people have more control over their days-on vs days-off pattern. So one can better optimize that for what you care about, whether that’s trying for least likelihood of work, or Tuesdays off for Kid #2’s soccer games. Another factor not mentioned in my prior post was work shift within the on-call days. Some folks like pre-dawn work & hate late night and some are the opposite. Seniors pick what they want, and juniors take what’s left over. Setting up my work patterns as to both day/dates on-call and shifts to minimize my likelihood of work is my personal secret sauce.
Once on-call during the month the roster of available folks of the moment are arranged in some kind of priority scheme. Different carriers do this quite differently, from round-robin to junior goes first to least month-to-date work goes first to a blend of the above to ???. But speaking in generalities …
If there’s one trip to be assigned then the next person whose on/off pattern and legalities can take the trip will get it. No choice involved. Conversely, if they have several trips to hand out to several interchangeable workers, most senior gets first pick and so on down the line. If there are more than enough available workers, the senior-most may be able to say “no thank you; I’ll stay home” and force more junior folks to take the work.
Or if one of the trips is nice enough and spouse and kids are getting on the senior person’s nerves, they can choose the long layover in Cancun and leave home for a couple days rest & relaxation while blaming the pesky company for their bad luck. 
Meanwhile the junior person goes to Cincinnati and Des Moines instead and some extra lucky junior person get a reprieve and stays home. Until something else goes wrong to somebody somewhere and another body is needed to fill the next resulting hole.
The former situation: “You’re next. Off to Cleveland for you. Hop to it!” is the more common scenario IME over 30+ years of this. So even for senior folks there’s not too much sense of being able to pick and choose destinations. There’s certainly no right of veto. You’re largely at the whim of whatever random stuff happens to become available as a result of whatever is going wrong and why.
The very senior-most of the regular schedule people do have that kind of control. e.g. “I want to visit only Rome and only on Tuesdays.” But only a tiny fraction of crewmembers ever reach that exalted level in their career, much less for most of it. I certainly have not been one of the annointed few and never will be. Rather the opposite; I’ve had to make do with the short end of this stick most of my years.
Still, it beats the heck out of working for a living. Been there, done that too.