Why not pick up a few mini splits from Home Depot and slap them in yourself?
I live in the Appalachian mountains, so one would think it should be reasonable labor rates for an area with a middle-low cost of living.
Except that we have a lake the next town over which is entirely covered in millionaire lake houses, so anyone working a trade here can and will charge obscene rates to local, normal people because they can command that rate from a rich transplant that is price insensitive.
You can occasionally find a good, reasonable guy or company still, but you’ll be calling around for days to find them.
Having previously spent a decade in a hot-market (Charleston, SC) you’ll find similar stories, there are plenty of workers in the area, but they’re almost always expecting to charge rates to wealthy price-insensitive transplants.
Heat pumps are still a luxury product here that you only see on new homes or well financed gut remodels, which I think is the problem. As market is largely price insensitive individuals here, there’s no downward pressure.
Edit: it seems that the market has decided that every manufacturer will ship the same cloud garbage and that the community has decided it actually isn't that hard to bypass and replace their wifi modules with ESPHome devices.