Meh, they tried to close HUN but BHM did an awful job with severe weather coverage when they trialed it. If we're talking about unneeded offices, lets talk about Caribou ME, Aberdeen SD, and Hastings NE.
The answer to these kinds of things is always politics. At some point Greer, SC probably had a rep that had oversight over Commerce. HUN still has an office because the rep threatened to nuke NEXRAD funding if they shut it down.
They bought Dark Sky a few years back and made it the backend for their weather app. DS claimed to have their own ultra-short-range model, but I never saw any verification data on it.
FWIW the snow that initially breaks through is drier than what we usually get. Some of the overperformance might be because it is starting out at 10:1. Also not losing any to cool the ground, which is nice.
Machine Learning engineers are plentiful. NOAA just doesn't pay well enough - Google and Meta pay the above-average ones $500k+ a year to figure out how to get your meemaw to click more ads.