There is an inherent conflict within this map and the intentions behind it. The conflicting goals are to reflect the realities of day-to-day life of the people who live in a region, and to make up names of the regions - whether they avoid using the names of the largest cities or not.

The day-to-day reality of the people of the place where I grew up is not a place called "Manhatta". It's New York. It doesn't matter if you live in the New Jersey part of New York, or the Connecticut part of New York, it's still New York. It doesn't make any sense to give a new name to a well-defined historical area that has had a name for over a century. Especially when that name goes even further in its bias by taking a name that refers to the island at the center of the region. The people of
Manhattan are snobbish enough already, they don't need to have the entire metro region of 22 million people renamed for their island of 1.6 million.

Then we have the place that I lived in for 8 years. It's called Chicagoland. Carl Sandburg has a street named after him in the Gold Coast neighborhood, and that's quite enough for a poet of middling stature. There's no need to rename what already has a name.

And since leaving Chicagoland, I've lived in Boston. This generally refers to the eastern half of Massachusetts, which does have reasonably strong links to the regions associated with it on the map. But I find it questionable to group Massachusetts's second cluster of universities with Connecticut rather than Massachusetts, and Boston. Nationwide data from 4 million commutes isn't going to change my mind. There are more than 4 million commutes every day in the Boston region. Beyond that, the educational institutions that make Massachusetts one of the premiere centers of learning in the world are connected with each other, and not with the insurance-industry city of Hartford. And anyone looking for an escape to the city from the Springfield region is going to head for Boston or New York, not Connecticut.

Perhaps this is a case where YMMV, but when I went to college in New York's capital district, it had a stronger affiliation with the New York metro area than anywhere else. Philadelphia also seems more linked to New York and DC than the largely agricultural and formerly industrial regions it's grouped with on the other side of the Appalachian mountains. Cf. Birmingham AL and Biloxi MS rather than Tallahassee.

And while I've only spent a few weeks there, the LA-Orange-Riverside-San Bernadino-San Diego region seems content with the name The Southland. It's certainly preferable to El Asphalta, which entirely obscures the fact that more than half of the region is sparsely populated desert. If you'd like, you can take this desert region, which is
essentially composed of Riverside and San Bernadino Counties, with the latter being the largest county in the nation, and call it the Inland Empire.

Other than that, if you'd really like to draw a line in the hills of southern Orange County to make San Diego into a separate region, it already has a name - San Diego. But I can assure you that you can make it from San Diego to LAX in 2 hours if you have the will to succeed and there's no immigration checkpoint to stop you.

Similarly to much of the above, Nashville is Nashville, and it doesn't need another name. Atlanta doesn't either, or Miami, DC, DFW.

"Big Sky" is already taken by Montana, the Big Sky Country, and there's no reason to transfer it to the fragmented left overs of the basin and range region of the country. I also hear that the cities of Colorado are known as The Front Range, and seem happy with it...

The "renaming" of America is unnecessary. Rather than giving "voice to the cultural diversity of the U.S., using Spanish, French, and American Indian names" (from National Geographic), the renaming erases the voice of the people who already live in these places. To a good extent, the names already reflect the cultural diversity of the US. New York is English, and the contribution of the English to the culture and the population of the US is predominant. Chicago is of Native American origin. Los Angeles and San Diego certainly are better as representatives of the Spanish contributions to the building of the US than the pseudo-Spanish insult of "El Asfalto".

Perhaps more consideration to deciding to rename a country would have been given if that country were in Africa or Asia. I suspect that the bad taste of cultural denigration would have more readily risen if the travel patterns of the west African coastal nations were to be rewritten across national borders, or if China or India were put to the test.