Am i choosing the wrong friends or being a bad friend?

Oh wow, I've been thinking about the EXACT same thing for the last few years. I'm older than you, in my forties, so my friendships with some of these people span beyond a few decades, and just like you some of mine started in grade school, and what I find to be particularly, shockingly, HI-LARIOUS is that - again like you - a large part of this past year I for some reason have spent hanging out with those who are 30 to FORTY years older than me. And after feeling weird about it I spent about 10 seconds thinking about it and quickly reached the conclusion that it's simply because I find them so so so much more interesting - and just plain all around more enjoyable!- than these 'friends' I've had since first grade....so ... in the interest of brevity....here's the main 'gist' of what I've learned from my experiences thus far:

In response to your "I'm not sure if other women feel this way about their 'friends' and just hide their true feelings or if I'm really missing out on having sincere and meaningful friendships with other women in my peergroup." the answer is yes and yes. I'm also a woman who feels the exact same way so clearly you're not alone. We're not alone. And yes, we are missing out on quality, meaningful relationships with our peers because of our loyalty to our long term friendships even though these friends are no longer compatible with us - and are even in some cases detrimental to us. We need to let go of these old friends to create room for new ones. There's only so many hours in a day, right? There's only so much time for so many people. The hard part is letting go of the old friendships without feeling guilty/bad/resentful about it. I've kind of reached the point where I've reconciled with the fact that these 'dear old friends' are now only dear for the memories we share and really nothing more. We've all grown into tremendously different human beings and these friendships have now plaid themselves out. I can now barely hide my anxiety, uncomfortableness, and over-all complete unenjoyment of the situation whenever we're together. I'm forever holding back on saying so much of what I REALLY want to say to any one of them whenever we're together and I've been wondering if they feel same way. If they do feel the same way then what the heck kind of stupid, time sucking, useless exercise in self-inflicted pain are we all performing for each others sake? And if they don't feel the same way then why the heck am i doing it to myself? What am I afraid of losing if I let go of these people? There's absolutely nothing I'll lose at this point because no matter what - whether my 'freinds' ever see me again or not - I'll always have the memories we mae together. So I've been laying off the already very sparse contact I have with them (didn't even send them Xmas cards last Dec.) because I found that , with every interaction, they were replacing the good memories we had together a hundred years ago with new, very new actually, very freshly created unforgettable bad ones.
And I'd much rather just spend the rest of my life remembering the good times we had together. Wouldn't you?

We've all grown, some for better, some for worse, and some hardly at all, and I'm not going to feel guilty about no longer being friends because growing as a person is sometimes painful but always GOOD. And memories last a lifetime so....I'm 'quitting' while I'm ahead.

people are nice. you're a good person.