So with the introduction of cover photos it seemed logical to add them to albums, they are images after all. We have them for events!?

The current album page looks like this:

This results in a ton of white-space under the left sidebar, when using a right sidebar it means there isn't much room to show off the actual images.

Isn't this a better layout? No left column and a nice big album cover photo, pretty much the reason they were invented.

I'll beat the drum again for "compulsory album selection"  and together they make gallery much more use-able and better looking.

I totally agree.

The blog template actually can work quite well for albums, and expands images to entire width of the page.