Personally I don't think the vast majority of states deserve senatorial representation, much less the right to spend a significant portion of their budgets on exquisite buildings full of overpaid suits deciding asinine shit like "The state fruit of Missouri is the blueberry"

The problem is that federal representatives only represent their states. More often than not they don't give a flying fuck about anyone else. Which means they will burn the world to the ground as long as they get even the smallest concessions for their own voters. It might not be a bad idea to have a more fluid form of representative, where there's overlap between represented areas, but no two senators represent the exact same base. You'd leave the House alone, excepting to maybe expand it so it better reflects its representative states.

Obviously a pretty radical change that'd never happen, and kind of a spur-of-the-moment kind of thought by someone with literally no political training or experience... but it sounds better than what we have, at least in my internet addled brain.

Meh, who needs representatives? Throw them all in the meat grinder and direct democracy everything. You could probably even pay everyone to vote and still come up ahead of the endless pageantry, security, and other associated costs.

With a direct democracy you increase the problem I talked about a million-fold. Instead of a few hundred people selfishly taking care of their own interests instead of those of the whole country, you have a few hundred million doing the same.

If we had a much more educated and empathetic population, it'd be effective. But we're so far from that right now it's laughable.