Help please?

Ok, so after my rant about how much I didn't like the unbiased pattern, I thought, well heck, I just need to fill in that little bit of space in the middle of the bag where things are likely to fall out. Here's what I'm thinking is the key: shortrows! Here's a sketch (sorry for the poor handwriting) of what I had in mind. Think of a handbag with a flap closure:

So I swatched to see if I could figure out how to get this to work. My discovery? Stitches are little buggers! Why can't they be perfect little squares so that your row guage matches your stitch gauge? Here's my deformed mess:

Clearly, I have far too many rows to stitches along that diagonal to make a perfect little square that I was hoping for. Does anyone have any suggestions to fix this problem? I was thinking of alternating between knitting one more stitch and two more stitches on each subsequent short row, but am afraid that I'll get an even weirder looking swatch.

So back to the drawing board. I think I may just want to finish the square all on the bias by decreasing on either end and sewing all 4 squares together as planned and just knit the flap in the same way. The only difference to the original plan would be that the back view would just look like two squares knit on the bias instead of the neat V panel in the middle with the horizontal garter stitch. I think I can live with that, but what do y'all think?