I don't see that as a disconnect or a divide. I see it as the players, especially the ones with that sort of outlook, being those that are street savvy or dangerous enough to protect themselves. The ambience is showing the general lowly, downtrodden masses while the player characters are usually above that.
If you ever spend any time in a big city with neighborhoods that are considered very dangerous, where crime happens right out in the open on the street with cops often looking the other way, you will see the same thing. The general every day Joe and the Tourists will tread carefully and always been on edge while those with street smarts or street toughs move around like it's all just normal and they have nothing to fear. When I lived in San Fran, I was in the later camp.
In San Fran I lived in the middle of Crack Alley, where there were tones of cheap weekly rented hotels where all the crack addicts hung out. There was violence going on constantly, drug dealers out in the open and honestly, I couldn't make it a block without someone trying to solicit or hit on me. In the middle of crack Alley, I lived in a very secure high rise with multiple layers of security at the entrance and when I went out, I was often carrying a sword and most of the locals were very aware I knew how to use it if I had to. And before anyone tries to call BS on that, swords are absolutely legal in San Fran and most of California and common enough that a lot of bars won't even stop you from wearing it in their establishments, which isn't to say they are common, but you do occasionally see someone wearing one, especially in and around Japan Town or China Town. For anyone familiar with San Fran wondering what neighborhood I'm talking about, it's SOMA, south and southwest of the Powell BART station between the Expo and nightclub district, market street, the warehouse district and the Mission, which is the Mexican part of the city. Dolby's main headquarters is right on the edge of that neighborhood, and there are several famous bars and nightclubs in or right around the edge of it as well as a couple sex and BDSM clubs.
In addition to living in a bad neighborhood, my most common hangouts were in the Tenderloin, which is the redlight district of San Fran, and lower Haight Street, which is heavy gang turf with lots of project housing. Most of the people I regularly associated with were well aware of all the poverty, abuse, crime and victimization in any of those neighborhoods but all of us existed kind of above and outside of it and didn't pay much attention to it as it was just ambient atmosphere and not stuff that often touched any of us.
This is not out of the ordinary in most major cities, like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Boston, Atlanta, Miami all have similar neighborhoods. The Mix is just one of those types of neighborhoods on steroids and pushed to the dystopian cyberpunk amplification of it's volume, but the types of people that move in and exist in those settings would also be pretty similar.
