"But sinks aren't standard, and counter tops are cut to fit the sink.
It sounds
like she didn't get the sink, it came with the house. It's fairly
unlikely that
the plumber could be expected to find a sink to fit right in. So he
kludged it"

There are many sinks that will fit in the same size opening,
particularly the low/moderate cost ones. I just took out an
inexpensive double bowl 16 year old American Std. stainless sink and
replaced it with a modern Kohler very deep double bowl cast iron sink
with no major problem. If that were not generally possible, it would
be a disaster. If you wanted a new sink, you'd have to change the
countertop. The problems start to occur when you have morons doing
the work. Like, in my case, the opening was almost too big for the new
sink to work. The reason? The opening was cut far bigger than needed
for the stainless steel sink.

There is no excuse for kludging it. When it was obvious the opening
was too big, a professional would have told her the problem and then
try to find other sinks that would fit correctly.

"Doing a cheap workaround sometimes isn't necessarily a *bad* thing.
But you got
to accept that that's what it is. "

If by cheap, you mean half-assed, which is what this guy did, then it
is in fact a bad thing.

"Maybe there should be a standard set of sink 'footprints'. To my
knowledge,
there isnt'. Unless there is, without scads of luck, a replacement
will be
non-ideal. And to do the job right means replacing everything that
needs to
fit. A lot of things are like that. "

There isn't an absolute standard. However, if you go look at the same
type sink, eg double bowl, from most manufacturers, you will find that
with a hole cut for most of them, you can easily just drop in the same
type sink, or even slightly different styles, from the other
manufacturers. The problem with all this is that the plumber, finding
the sink he picked, never had a discussion with the homeowner as to
possible solutions. He just put a sink that is too small into the
existing opening. And that is a half-assed plumber.

"But in the bathroom remod, and the kitchen remod coming up, the sink
needs to be available
to get the counter cut. "

Yes, because if you're doing new countertops, that's the correct way.
That's entirely different than doing a sink replacement, in which case
the most critical thing is making sure the new sink can be fitted in
the existing opening.