What is asinine is counting the populations of suburban counties and then saying that makes a place a big city. This place is more large town than big city. I don't see what is so great about Buckhead, what used to be the village looks like ööööing Pyongyang right now.
Ask the average visitor to Athens and Atlanta what is the better drinking town.
This is about the dumbest thing I've read in a long time. One, you are missing the big picture. This isn't a debate about how big Atlanta is. It's a discussion about Atlanta's bar and restaurant scene. Being contrarian and quibbling about how big Atlanta is misses the point and doesn't advance that discussion at all. It's just you being an idiot.
Two, the point was that Atlanta has a helluva lot more people than Athens, and so comparing the two doesn't make sense. Even under your idiotic assessment, Atlanta proper has well over 400k people. That's more than Miami, which I'm sure you would agree with me is a city, not a town. That's also more than Cleveland, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Tampa, Oakland, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh. Again, all cities, not towns. Yet somehow, in your fantasy world, Atlanta (and its 400k+ people) are comparable to Athens. In fact, if you took every ass backward person in Clarke county and counted them, you wouldn't get much over 1/4 of that number and that's including the whole öööö county, not just "Athens proper." Tying it into the discussion, that Atlanta has so many people and is so much larger than Athens makes it significantly more difficult (especially in light of how Atlanta developed) to have one centralized set of bars and restaurants. There are not many places bigger than Atlanta that have "one" spot like what people are saying. Maybe San Antonio, but I haven't been there. Other than that, if you are just talking about the population of city proper, it's Memphis or Las Vegas, and maybe Nashville.
The second problem with your logic is that, according to you, the millions of people that live in surrounding areas - like Sandy Springs, Marietta, Dunwoody, Decatur, etc. - simple don't count. They don't come to Atlanta ever under your analysis. You could be like my mom, who lives a mile inside the perimeter in Sandy Springs, and yet not count when assessing the size of the city. That makes no sense in this context.
If anything, it supports what I've been saying the whole time that, because Atlanta is so big, you are going to find a lot of good eating and drinking options but they just aren't centralized. Because the actual "city" isn't as populated as the immediate surrounding areas, it makes sense that there are good options going from Midtown and sprawling to the North and the East. If you had thought more about what you were saying in the context of this discussion, rather than trying to quibble for the sake of being cute, you might have realized that.
EDIT: And you may as well be asking a visitor what is the better college town - Athens or Atlanta. If your question is, what is the best place to drink really cheap beer and oogle sorority girls, it's clearly athens. If your question is which place has better food and drinking options, its clearly Atlanta (unless, again, you are mostly interested in lower priced options). I'm not saying Athens doesn't have good upper scale options, but that's not the focus of the Athens market and the number of places and selection isn't near what you would find in Atlanta, which makes sense for most people.