strong behavior of horizontal cropping

Since updating to Lightroom Classic 15, the behavior of the Crop tool when drawing a new crop box with the mouse has changed.

I am a high-volume photographer and process around 50,000 photos per year, often in batches of 1,000–3,000 images. For many years, my workflow has been to press R and immediately draw a completely new crop box with the mouse. I do not resize the existing crop by dragging its corners.

Previously, when working on a portrait image with a locked aspect ratio (for example 2:3 / As Shot), I could simply start dragging a tall, narrow rectangle and Lightroom would immediately recognize that I wanted a portrait-oriented crop.

Now, when I start drawing a new crop box, Lightroom keeps the crop in landscape orientation. It only switches to portrait orientation after I drag the mouse a very long distance vertically. In many cases I have to drag almost to the bottom edge of my screen before it finally switches from landscape to portrait. When the area I want to crop is relatively small, there is simply not enough room to make Lightroom switch orientation.

I know that pressing X changes the crop orientation, but that is not a suitable workaround. Pressing X immediately creates/rotates the existing crop box, while my workflow is to draw a new crop box directly with the mouse. Having to draw the crop and then press X for every single image would also add an extra action to thousands of photos.

This behavior did not occur in previous versions of Lightroom Classic. I used this exact workflow for many years without any problem.

I have already reset the Lightroom preferences at startup, but this did not change the behavior. I have also tried explicitly selecting a 2:3 aspect ratio, changing its orientation and then moving to the next image, but the problem returns.

The main issue seems to be the threshold at which Lightroom decides whether a newly drawn crop should be landscape or portrait. That threshold now requires far too much vertical mouse movement.

Could Adobe please restore the previous crop-drawing behavior, or provide an option to control this orientation-switching threshold? For high-volume photography workflows, being able to draw a new portrait 2:3 crop immediately with one mouse movement is essential.