[Grishnakh]

You're exactly right, and that's why I've been advocating redrawing the state boundaries for years now. There was a project decades ago called "The 38 States" (google it) where a college class came up with a new map of the US with more optimized state borders, with the goal of having more equal populations in each state, not having metro areas cross state borders, and grouping like regional cultures together, and also reducing the total number of states to reduce overhead.

I think a big project to redraw all the borders would be painful, but would create big gains before too long. I don't know that they need to be redrawn every couple of decades though; perhaps a few little tweaks here and there would be called for though. But the borders we have a completely at odds with where they should be for administrative efficiency.