comment: >
  
  I think for the good of the republic, we're probably going to have to revisit what is "too cumbersome" in that regard.
context: Part of the issue is some states simply aren’t competitive outside of hyper concentrated areas. You’d have to go out of your way to create a Republican seat in MA or a Democratic seat in ID. It’s a little easier to imagine Dem seats in red states because so many of them crack deep blue cities (looking at you TN & TX) that left in their own homogenous districts would be unwinnable for Republicans—indeed, their current majority is basically built off of this—than it is more GOP seats in blue ones (many have non-partisan redistricting, although you could argue for IL being worth a couple of red seats). It would make a mockery of the principles people say they want; compact lines that respect municipal & county boundaries and when necessary to split them for population requirements to do so in a way that reflects communities of interest.
  Now what you might be able to argue for would be a plan where the median seat was required to match the statewide partisan lean (perhaps with a secondary requirement that the average across all seats couldn’t deviate by more than…2 points?) The exact formula of what to include and how to weight it would be the subject of a lot of self interested wrangling, but theoretically, a playing field where, for example, Ohio’s 8th seat of 15 was R+7ish or Wisconsin’s 4th and 5th seat of 8 had to average to D+0.5 and only half the seats could be redder or bluer would leave the House very reactive to the electorate. 
  You’d still have very safe seats on both ends, but under this scenario, instead of 18 Biden won GOP held districts, you might have 40. The careful observer will note that’s a lot larger that the 20 recalcitrant holdouts denying the speakership to McCarthy at present, and would also have given the GOP a thundering majority whereby the Freedom Caucus could stomp its feet all they wanted and it wouldn’t mean a damn thing. >
  
  To your point...In the NC case a few years ago, the republicans essentially argued that democrats didn't have a gerrymandering problem, they have a geography problem. When the state legislature drew new compact districts, it created an imbalance since the metro areas leaned so heavily democrat, but were geographically compact. >
  
  That's only really an issue because we have an arbitrary cap (538) on the number of congressional representatives, so you end up in situations where in deep blue areas you might have 1 congressional representative representing >1 million people and in rural areas you have 1 rep representing <500,000 people. >
  
  Do you mean between states? Within a state districts are required to be as  close to even population as possible >
  
  It was capped because even 435 was becoming too cumbersome