State Reworks: An Alternative Proposal

I was looking at the recent discussions about State size vs Population & stuff, and I was thinking about how I'd go about reworking States so as to better represent their existence as political divisions rather than, essentially, separate planes of reality. Obviously, the specifics of this would likely need a ton of rebalancing & whatever, especially for performance, migration, MAPI, et cetera, but I think it'd work as a passable starting point. Thoughts?

- Basic unit of land is not States, but the extant Provinces system; however, one still interacts with land on the State level. State modifiers are moved to the Province level, but apply to states that have such a province in them.

- Depending on a country's laws, States may be merged, have provinces rearranged, or provinces split off to form new States if a given set of requirements are met. This can only be done every decade or so per state, so as to prevent exploits. Depending on the circumstances, this may also hit legitimacy as well (for instance, making a bajillion Free &/or Slave states in the US to swing Congress one way or the other).

- Provincial shuffling will cause pops and buildings to be dynamically distributed based on modifiers & stuff inherent to the states. For instance, splitting Maine off from Massachusetts will cause it to take primarily Logging and Fishing buildings, as well as enough pops to support them, but would leave most of the Urban buildings as well as a portion of the Rural buildings in MA. Meanwhile, splitting Prussian states with Polish pops will cause provinces further towards the Southeast, that is to say, in the direction of neighboring Polish-majority provinces, to contain more Poles.

- Population-scaling bureaucracy costs should instead be State-scaling, with each state contributing something like X + Y*Population^a + Z*Provinces^b, so while it theoretically may be better for economy of scale and decrees to cram your entire population into one state, that'll massively tank your bureaucracy. Meanwhile, while it might be better for construction and infrastructure to have each Province be its own state, that'll also tank your bureaucracy. (I have no idea what exactly the coefficients would be, and they'd require massive amounts of tweaking anyway I think).

- The political power and voting strength of pops in a given state will be multiplied by (X*Incorporated Population)/State Population, with X depending on things like the way a country is organized. For instance, in the US, X would be pretty high, representing the disproportionate weight of votes in smaller states vs larger states. A Unitary State like France, meanwhile, would have X be high for only the capital, while the other states would be less important (and the US would have it be 0 for the capital, because DC doesn't have proper representation).

- During times like Civil Wars, states are liable to split along Loyalist & Revolutionary lines, so long as they neighbor both Loyal & Revolting states. This could be scripted to happen with West Virginia, for instance. Whether or not they remain split, of course, would depend on the victor and relative state sizes.

- Contiguous unincorporated territory would be treated as a single entity from which states can be created. This would hopefully solve that thing that happens when a single family crosses the line between Kansas and Colorado and immediately starts starving because they are now the only people living on that particular plane of reality.