long-standing usability problem with material "preview spheres"

Working with particle materials has always been a substantial pain because they display on the "sides" of the preview spheres in the material browser. Check out this image:



There are materials for five substantially different blue particles in this shot alone (I have tons more, of various shapes and sizes), and it's basically impossible for me to differentiate them when in the material browser that pops up when I click the flyout button in the Renderer component of my Particle Systems.

It's similarly problematic for other particle types and of course for non-particle assets, such as meshes that show up in weird orientations that are difficult and usually slow to distinguish from others.

I tried adding PreviewType to (some of) the shaders, but inexplicably that doesn't affect this, only the tiny preview icon at the top of the actual material inspector.

Is there any way to improve this? Either being able to set all of them to Plane, or, being able to rotate these spheres into non-useless angles, would be fantastic. I just want to be able to pop up the material browser and see, at a glance, a hundred or however many particle materials so I can quickly zero in on the one I need.