There's no need to apologise, and I appreciate your intentions, so don't be discouraged
One very important point that has just occurred to me, and may well get lost in the noise, is that you are running MC v14. You should try v15 and see if you like some of the new viewing features it contains.
rick has already posted a shot of one standard view layout you could employ, and here's another. This is not cropped, this is what you see on screen. Here, you have ratings, keywords, or anything else you fancy down the left side, a useful right-click menu and a nice big image
preview. You get into this "Cover view" state by pressing ctrl+5 or clicking on the square icon to the right of the thumbnail slider.
preview has to be the operative word here, wouldn't you agree?
you've just imported a batch of images and want to run through them applying quick tags such as ratings, and rotate any that may require it, and delete any rubbish. In my mind, and my own personal workflow, I call that previewing. Actual viewing, in glorious display view, comes after that, when we can sit and watch a slideshow, to music if we fancy, reading any captions I've applied, and not worry about rotating things and deleting rubbish.
btw, if you have been using MC for 5+ years, you should remember a time when we didn't even have a thumbnail slider!! We had to go into "Customise View" to change the size of the thumbnails!! Imagine
MC has come a looong loong way with regards to image handling in the past 3 years or so. I can't get into using its image editor at all, (reasons have been posted, can't find link right now) and it still can't do EXIF date/time shifting, but for previewing / viewing images, MC is all I need now, and 3 years or so ago, that was certainly not the case. Sometimes, you just need a bit of patience, grasshopper!
regards,
-marko