Maryland's map is extremely ugly mostly due to the restraints of the Voting Rights Act, IIRC.
If you are talking about the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that doesn't apply to Maryland IIRC.
I would be very interested if someone has taken the time to see what the party makeup of this theoretical House would be...
My gut tells me that this map would give the republicans a deadlock on the house about as severe as the current gerrymandering does. This has the conditions favorable to republicans, tightly packed urban only districts and black districts in the southern states diluted out among the white districts. Democrats do better under mapping where urban votes and rural votes are more mixed together and where there is some minority representation in the south.
OK, so let's look at the requirement where any city with more than a million people is considered its own state. The problem, of course, is defining that. Population within corporate limits produces a counterintuitive list: Virginia Beach has more people than Atlanta, and the I've-never-heard-of-it Mesa, Arizona beats them both, as well as beating Cleveland, New Orleans and St. Louis. Aurora, Colorado beats Pittsburgh. Tulsa beats Minneapolis. El Paso beats Boston and Seattle. Only nine cities (New York, LA, Chicago, Houston, Philly, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego and Dallas) reach the million mark! And the next two are...San Jose, California and Jacksonville, Florida. We need to do better.
Metropolitan measures are better, if we could get a constitutional definition of a metro area so that you can't gerrymander by packing the Census Bureau with party favorites. Currently, here's the metro areas (Metropolitan Statistical Areas) that hit the million mark (there are 51 of them):
New York, LA, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, DC, Miami, Atlanta, Boston
San Fran, Riverside (CA), Detroit, Phoenix, Seattle, Minneapolis, San Diego, Tampa, St. Louis, Baltimore
Denver, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Antonio, Sacramento, Orlando, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Kansas City, Las Vegas
San Jose, Columbus (OH), Charlotte, Austin, Indianapolis, VA Beach, Nashville, Providence, Milwaukee, Jacksonville
Memphis, Louisville (KY), OK City, Richmond, Hartford, New Orleans, Raleigh, Salt Lake City, Buffalo, Birmingham (AL), Rochester
The definition of a metro area is of course really nebulous, and would be hard to pull off. Still, this would ensure that cities aren't disenfranchised. The rest of the country could be treated as one large city that would be divided according to splitline...although I do have to wonder how you pull off splitline in a territory with numerous holes in it. Splitline seems to require a modicum of topological continuity, which is probably why that big-ass nationwide map I posted didn't cover Alaska or Hawaii.