I thought gerrymandering is the art of creatively drawing the lines such that all of the opposing constituents are squeezed into one or a few "throwaway districts", thus preserving comfortable majorities in the remaining districts.
How is this self-limiting? Also, I don't quite see how it maps to the rather abstract phenomenon you are talking about?
Cryptonector's comment makes very little sense. It's an obvious advantage if you can move the boundaries between two seats in order to go from 80-20/50-50 to 75-25/55-45.
If you maximize seat safety, you minimize the number of seats you have because you bunch up all your voters. This means that the opposition need only flip a few districts to win back a majority (and then redistrict to their liking!).
If you maximize the number of seats you have then you spread your voters thin. This makes it easier to win in a wave: with many districts close to 50/50, you only have to flip a few percent of the voters state-wide or nation-wide and you win. And that's exactly what's been happening. We've had a number of wave elections recently.
It's somewhat frustrating though when you can see that one area is 200k people and another is 50k people but the party negatively affected (someone will be) by re-drawing the boundaries to be "fairer" will scream bloody murder and claim Gerrymandering.
How is this self-limiting? Also, I don't quite see how it maps to the rather abstract phenomenon you are talking about?
Edit -- wikipedia seems to match up with what I was remembering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering