I'd request a thumbnail option that
* resizes the image proportionally to fit into a given frame (as is already present)
* then pads the image to fill exactly that frame (transparently, or, if not supported by the image format, with a configurable color, by default ideally with the WP theme background color) -- compare this to a "resize canvas" operation.
This would yield a proportional, uncropped thumbnail that because of its padding still has fixed dimensions. Looks much better if a gallery contains lots of images with different dimensions than the unpadded version; and it's good in case the cropped thumbnails aren't desirable either.