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Yes, I'm familiar with the "set rules, draw by algorithm" method. (And there are rules that people find generally agreeable for this process; compactness and existing political/geological boundaries are good examples.) One issue is that when you make a list of popular and well-justified rules, it becomes hard to simultaneously satisfy them. The bigger deal is that someone has to code the setup, and someone has to approve the result, and these are capturable positions. Unfortunately, it is very very hard to make a job "apolitical" and also retain accountability in cases where a partisan sneaks in--Madison et al. tried their best at this exact problem with judges, and various controversies with the judiciary only emphasize the limited success you can have.
...There's another, and much bigger problem, though. If you district by naive algorithm like this, Republicans win the districting process an overwhelming majority of the time. The reason is the actual, on-the-ground political map--Democrats tend to cluster in cities, Republicans dominate the towns and rural areas. The goals with political gerrymandering are sometimes known as "packing and cracking"--pack one district with all the opponent voters you can stuff in, 90%+ if you can get it, and crack other concentrations between districts, with no more than 40-45% opposition. If your opposition is already clustered, packing and cracking are much easier to accomplish using inoffensively shaped districts.
If compact districts favoured Republicans as much as you think they do, then Republican legislatures would draw maps with compact districts. The fact that Republicans are drawing salamander-shaped districts suggests that the bias inherent in compact districts (which is real) isn't enough to satisfy them.
Incidentally, if you measure bias as "who gets more seats when the popular vote is a 50-50 split" then the largest natural bias is the one if favour of the party whose safe seats have lower turnout.
...or that there are other considerations in play, such as that it's been illegal for them to do so for some time, in large part because of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which mandated racial demographic consideration (a requirement for gerrymander) and federal approval of changes (an obstacle to breaking it). Federal preclearance was only voided for a number of Republican-controlled states in 2013. There has literally only been 1 census cycle, and one congressional district reorientation, since then.
At which point you not only have the specter of (already ongoing) lawfare, but the secondary implications of working from the inertia of already-existing political subdivisions, like state counties, which themselves are often the anchoring points of congressional districts, and the political power structures that exist within and amongst these that interacts with what the legislatures can do. Even if an entire legislature was held by the Republicans, just the nature of the patronage network disruption and individual self-interests would make it a fratricide-heavy environment to pick the winners and choosers.
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I agree it's hard to fill any political position with non-partisans, not too different than what we have presently.
I also agree it's difficult to 'optimize' for many inputs / variables simultaneously.
Given that; I think having a set number of candidate maps perhaps with different measures of compactness and / or different weightings of the well justified rules. The apolitical / political could then vote / choose among the candidate maps. This I believe would still be a more apolitical and transparent process than what we have now.
That members of one party may choose to live in cities, disproportionately, doesn't strike me as an argument in favor of not adopting a more transparent process. Nor do I find the argument that if we don't gerrymander, Republicans win, convincing.
With regard to voting on a selection of maps--one of the issues here is you can get pretty big effects from nudging lines a relatively small amount, or at least what looks like a small amount from looking at a map. As a practical matter, voters are just going to be considering big-picture aesthetics, and no matter how you rigorously define a "fair map," the difference between a fair map and an artfully-drawn map is really difficult to detect, much more so than I'd expect voters to want to master. It's actually a strong example of a policy area better handled through representation, which just takes us back to politically-drawn maps.
I should explain my last point better. It's not that there's a problem with Republicans winning a disproportionately large amount of the time--I would cough prefer that, myself. The problem is any specific party winning way more reliably and more often than relative vote totals suggest they should. Even if--as here--it would only be a result of neutral rules applied to the aggregate of people freely deciding where to live, the disproportionate result looks and feels unfair, which undermines popular happiness with the system and societal stability. Some of that is inevitable! But elections are supposed to generate results broadly reflective of underlying support over time, and an institutional skew in one direction cuts against that.
From the maps I've seen i don't know that Republicans would be more likely to win in cities. I think they would be more likely to win in rural districts areas that sometimes include pie slices or slivers of the nearest city.
My preference would be to have the computer nudge the line based on publicly available inputs, weightings and published algorithm. Now the line is nudged due to a wink and a handshake or a horsetrade to keep / make a safe seat.
I'd rather argue over the inputs and design of the algorithm to be used over the entire state than the boundary or shape of any specific district. I'd expect wins and losses in any redistricting. If you believe compact non-gerrymandered districts would benefit Republicans that suggests to me they're disadvantaged presenty.
Republicans are rather unlikely to win very many city council seats in large cities, no matter what method you use. For state legislatures, though, the advantage of cities for Republicans is that they come pre-packed--it's trivial to draw compact districts where Democrats have a huge margin, which writes off those districts, but by concentrating opposition voters, allows for more success elsewhere. And yes, a mostly suburban/rural district with a small slice of city is generally a winnable district for Republicans, and an example of cracking.
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