Recreating a media_gallery using a view?
I haven't used Media Gallery, but have used a few others - they all do similar things though often in quite different ways. 

First off, it's not really necessary to create a new node for each image - Image Field can contain multiple images, depending on its configuration.

I recently created a Gallery content type with two image fields - one for the gallery "cover" with a single image and one with unlimited images allowed, for the gallery contents. I then used Views to create a View with several Page displays (one to display a list of galleries, another to display each gallery's contents), along with the Colorbox module for image display in a lightbox, and the Plup module (and plupload jquery plugin) to do drag and drop all-at-once uploads into the gallery. Works like a champ and very easy for site maintainers to deal with - all they have to do is upload a "cover" image, drag the whole mess o' images into the plupload area, give it a title, and save it. 

Doing it this way lets you leverage image styles in several places - the cover image, the gallery page images, and the colorbox display images - plus Colorbox makes it possible to set up the gallery slideshow as automatic or manual advance. Pretty cool, and no custom code to write. You can fiddle with the View's output options as needed and, should you need more styling action, you have the option of writing theme templates to get the output looking the way you need it.

You can see it at work at http://betheldrupal.m-so.com/galleries - not in production yet but working well so far...

Let me know if you want details - I can export the views and stuff if need be.