Playing around with how district lives are drawn isn't democratic reform, it's democracy theater, a means of diverting attention without changing anything meaningful.
Gerrymandering can add ~30% of representatives for the party controlling it, so changing it to a party method does improve things a lot, even if it is arguably very far from perfect.
Its only a thing when the "perfect" is not a real alternative.
Systems that produce more proportional representation than any means of line drawing in single-member winner-take-all districts are real alternatives that are well-established in the real world.
But changing how districts are drawn actually does happen in this country. California degerrymanderified their process a few years ago.
[1]like the Olson criterion, which when optimised by a computer program results in district boundaries apparently likely to return mostly Republicans in California...
Most gerrymandering doesn't bias rural districts; it biases suburban districts that are marginal majorities (usu republican) only after redrawing the lines. Any automatic line redrawing algorithm will defeat this, since it takes a lot of perverse effort to draw boundaries that are sufficiently biased to serve Machiavellian pols.
A) The status quo is massive Gerrymandering, so something like the Shortest Splitline Algorithm would be a massive improvement.
B) The point is not to make quasi-proportional-representation with districts. The point is to make a legislature whose laws are representative. To that end, it does not matter if the constituents of a given district happen to have a lot in common.