The travel part can be overblown because I agree that the team had a lot of travel in the BE. Most of these conferences now cover a lot of territory.
The real missing piece is natural rivalries. Every game feels like an OOC game. Most spread out conferences have at least several groupings of 2 or 3 natural rivals. Temple is now the closest thing we have to that, and there is no rivalry there. Certainly on court performance can create periodic rivalries that aren't what I'd call "natural," the territorial pride stuff. UConn had good on court rivalries with GTown and Pittsburgh, but that is because we were good at the same time. That could happen even in the AAC. But losing to a BC or a PC was always much less tolerable than losing to most of the others.
I go way back to the Yankee Conference days and Wes Bialosuknia. We knew we had a great regional team and program, but rarely a national one. There were no games that people got into more than with UMass or URI. Fun stuff. Now, these games are just plain business. No loss is ever fun, but the guy next door to any of us who live in CT or the northeast is likely to say "in your face", when we lose to Houston because they couldn't locate Houston correctly on a Texas map let alone have any connection to the school. Ditto for most of the AAC conference foes. It's the reason I'd rather, if it ever happens, wind up in the ACC which at least has several of our BE rivals, BC and SU in particular. I say that even with two sons who graduated from Big 10 (at the time) schools. It would make for family fun and a conference I like better overall for various reasons, but natural rivalry isn't one of them aside of RU.