How to create a grid of all galleries without using teasers?

I need to create a page that displays all my galleries in a grid. Each cell of the grid should contain the title of the gallery and a thumbnail of one (let's say the first) of the images from the gallery. I don't want to use teasers (more difficult to customize) and need to work at the field level.

The problem is obviously the inability to access the images' fields from the gallery node - the nodereference is reversed. I tried the Reverse Node Reference module (http://drupal.org/project/reverse_node_reference) but the version of my MySQL database is not supported by it. I also tried the NodeReferrer module but it has a bug, which hasn't been fixed for the last one year that breaks it in exactly this situation: http://drupal.org/node/752706

So my question is: what other options do I have if I want to build a gallery-of-galleries view at the field level?