Is there a way to keep Preview contact sheet from dis-proportionately scaling?

I've been looking for a nice contact sheet facility. I learned that Preview has such a thing — "Oh joy!" I thought! But Preview (Version 11, from Catalina) disproportionately scales height and width, yielding square images in the contact sheets! AAARRRGGGHHH!!! **NOBODY** wants that to happen to their images! Looking back on the historical meaning of "contact sheet," how could they even THINK that would be acceptable? I've been poking around, trying to see if this could be changed somehow. Holding down any of the meta keys while selecting "Contact Sheet" does nothing useful. I've glanced through Preview's .plist file in ~/Library/Preferences. I don't know enough about defaults(1) to know if there's anything in there that could be hacked. I posted this on Apple's community site, and apparently this is fixed in newer MacOS releases, but there are no plans to fix this for Catalina, and my hardware won't run anything newer. Alternatively, anyone know if a newer version of Preview (with aspect-preserving contact sheets) works in Catalina? Thanks in advance for any information offered! I'm a retired developer, and am willing to poke around if given a decent likelihood of finding something.