yea there are many different factors that make people choose one over the other... maybe you have friends at uts, maybe there is a particular course (like forensics science, where uts is apparently the only uni to offer in australia) that you want to study at uts, maybe you just don't like the enviornment of usyd. prefering one uni over another just because of academic prestige is a very narrow-minded view to understand why someone would pick a particular place to study.
i think coolcat once said that they cannot understand why someone would go to a competitive school... lowk its also about the academic prestige, so that's just a contradiction of what you are saying here lol