Man, a 3/4 inch bevel saving you two hours is cool and all but calling that a bad fit-up seems like a stretch. A 60 inch vessel with 1-1/2 wall is gonna move on its own once you start tacking, bevel or no bevel, so I would want to know if that gap was actually the bevel doing the work or just the steel relaxing. I have seen guys swear by some trick and then find out the fit was never that far off to begin with. Forty minutes vs three hours is a big spread for a single bevel, so something else probably helped too. Not saying it did nothing, just saying I would test it again before I put it in the playbook.

So your buddy's secret is just being too tired to have taste, got it.

Sort of agree but you're missing that "rude" can be a real warning sign even without a direct quote. Waited two days during a cold snap is a fair gripe in my book, pipes freeze and that's an emergency, so a plumber who won't answer the phone or call back is telling you something. But yeah, the bare "they were rude" with zero details is useless. What I look for is a pattern, three people saying the same guy talked down to them or didn't show up when he said. One person mad about price with no quote posted? Skip it. Five people saying the work leaked again? That's the real stuff.