My point is, that state and local borders should be formed for political reasons or geographic reasons. Much of the borders of the modern United States were formed through land grabs by powerful landowners or through piece-by-piece acquisition and structuring.
Obviously, if you erased all the borders and asked economists and politicians to start from scratch, it would be completely different.
So has this conversation come up in Congress before, or would it be career suicide to even bring it up? Also, obviously it seems too arduous to attempt.
Have any prominent professors/researchers proposed appropriate state boundaries? How many would there be? More or less than 50?
Well you're assuming that the federal government is in control of state borders and that's simply isn't the case.
A state government has sovereign control of its territory equal to the federal government.
We aren't a unitary government where the central government creates and dismantles a providences government at will.
I'm afraid you're going to have to be more specific. Without examples of these land grabs, acquisitions, and structurings, I don't think I can answer. However, I can point you to an excellent book if you want to learn more about the subject.
The History of Public Land Law by Paul Wallace Gates. It's available for free download at http://heinonline.org