Blog Thumbnails are Out of Control

Mhhh.....this is indeed a poor implementation.....I believe we modded the widget to 'fit to column' ....lemme check where we did this....

Yes we usually customize the widget and set dimensions for the images. Doesn't matter what kind of image a user uploads, the widget just crops out a square or rectangle of the image. The mid/center part for example. That way all your images will display the same. Christopher G. Stanton 

Doesn't this mean customising a core out of the box widget that would need to be maintained on every platform update?

Or was it managed in some other manner?

We've seen this too Chris. It's usually when a post is displayed in its own 'row' because of the configuration. 

However, completely agree with you in that if you modify or 'customise' the widget yourself to overcome the issue, it's not addressing the issue at the core. 

It does require custom CSS, you can do this in the core out of the box widget (which would need to be reviewed on every platform upgrade indeed). But we tend to do these changes in a separate CSS widget where we keep all CSS changes for most of the widgets so we only have to do extra work for that widget on upgrade.