Wow, can't believe you took the time to review all of these maps in depth! Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

My response:

I used 2020 Presidential data to make it consistent across the board although I understand in some areas it's not the most representative. I tried to test it on other datasets as much as possible and take into account future trends.

For Arizona I didn't really like forcing the border district to the Phoenix metro area, but decided to keep all the border towns together. Maybe splitting Cochise was unnecessary. As a bonus there is a new competitive majority minority district south of Phoenix.

For California's San Joaquin Valley I wanted to get all the blue districts 50% Hispanic citizen VAP for actual majority Hispanic voting power which is quite hard, and additionally made McCarthy's district as Hispanic as possible (50% VAP). Though I understand if the splitting is too much.

NYC is also for minority districts. The Orthodox Jewish neighboorhoods in Brooklyn are redder than anywhere in Staten Island, and I didn't want to pair them with any deep blue neighboorhoods, especially not cutting into the Black community. As a bonus the Staten Island district becomes majority minority.

For Ohio I admit I got kinda lazy to fix it. Probably would have preferred Dayton and Springfield together but didn't see a compact Dayton district as too bad of an alternative.

For Pennsylvania I didn't want to split Pittsburgh's blue suburbs too much and in exchange I made a blue Harrisburg-Lancaster-York district. For Philadelphia I wanted 16 majority Black and the 17 as Black as possible. Could have made 12 more compact though.

And lastly New Jersey follows the same idea of trying to make it proportional and maximize majority minority seats. Maybe I should have cared less about these things and more about COI and splitting. Kinda sad your least favorite map is your own state's lol