Although if that metaphor is too rough I suppose we can also go with the inmates running the asylum

Seats of government necessarily become cities. You don’t create a new city to keep power away from cities. State governments tended to be put in central locations for the convenience of all urban and rural dwellers, and away from existing power centers to avoid concentrating power with the wealthy.

The electoral college demands proportional representation in presidential elections. It says nothing about whether the electors are rural or urban dwellers. In fact, proportional representation weakens the power of less populous states.

The original unicameral continental congress with only a senate gave more power to less populous states, but the founding fathers found it effectively gave any single state veto power, which was counterproductive, and hence the great compromise was passed creating the House.

This is a myth. The electoral college as originally conceived simply granted a elector count[1] to the states and let them decide how to allocate them. It had nothing to do with urban/rural divide, which barely existed at all outside of the three (!) states that actually had cities of meaningful size.

The interpretation you're proposing is decidedly modern. It's a retcon intended to justify the fact that "red" states in the modern electorate are clearly wielding outsized influence. But even that has only been true for 2-3 decades.

[1] What asymmetry existed was actually because of the way senate seats are allocated. Its effect on presidential elections was essentially an accident.

There is clear, documented evidence that slavery and the three fifths compromise are directly related to the creation of the electoral college: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/elec...

Meanwhile, the reason for the electoral allocation reflects one of the most fundamental compromises in the design of the federal system: is the national government be representative of the people, or is it representative of the states? The answer is it's both--that's why there's one house for the people and one house for the states (the Senate). And the number of electors for the president is similarly a compromise, giving one vote for each member of both houses. (Again, recall that senators were not elected by popular vote until the 20th century).

There was no concept of a rural/urban political divide, because urbanization really wasn't a thing in 1787. The overarching concern of the people who wrote the Constitution was balancing the powers of a state like Virginia versus Rhode Island--the small state/large state divide is the major focal point of discussion--although there was also a contentious issue over the role of slavery (of course, in 1787, most states were slave states--only Massachusetts had fully abolished slavery by that point, although the rest of New England had just adopted a gradual abolition program) which yields the ⅗ compromise.