That's what I do. Wait, what happens when Atlas is installed? Maybe I'll go install Atlas. I usually use Cartographer when I don't use Carbonite, 'cause it's like Atlas only awesome, but it doesn't play well with Carbonite, so it's been losing some love lately. I'll give Atlas a try.
Anyway, tangent. Back on topic: I do maximize it. But I actually have a Carbonite map that isn't the same size/shape as the minimap. So I have the outside world with quest objectives sticking out the bottom of my maximized/square minimap. (This also means that it's still drawing the main map, which, if I have my minimap maximized, isn't realy necessary and is probably dropping my frame rate by 5 or so (and my friend's frame rate by 50)...) -- So I end up having to re-size my minimap when I go in an instance to try to make it so I'm not distracted by the background outside map (which is actually impossible, the way the minimap maximizing algorithm works, I always have at least one line of the outside world drawing when it's maximized -- this may be because I max-window windowed mode in a normal resolution on a wide screen...causes more problems with addon alignment algorithms than you'd expect... ) -- which then leads to more annoyance after the instance, when I need to re-size it back to "as large as I can fit without blocking my buffs or my button interface on the right side", which is also a surprising amount of work. Seems like an automated "just go away now" toggle would save a lot of effort.
-x