I’m also a bit lost. From the final sentence “having it put each name in quotes should be fucking trivial.” OP seems to complain that filenames with spaces expand into multiple arguments. I can’t recreate this with this command in bash:

$ printf %s\\n *.jpg

This command prints each argument in its own line. Replace *.jpg with whatever to prove it to yourself. Filenames with spaces show in full in a single line for me.