Finding a way to salvage either a bad sight or a bad sight cut is something that a gunsmith has to do from time to time. Tooling wears, dovetails sometimes come out undersized, or even oversized...only takes .001 or less to make a good dovetail into a bad dovetail. When a cutter wears, it will cut under-sized. So you have to run it through again to make up the difference, and it's not hard for that second pass to take off just the slightest amount too much off, leaving you with an oversized dovetail and a problem. This happens WAY more than most will ever know.
So from the outside it appears they did salvage it quite well, the OP was unaware of anything amiss at all. To me it's not the fact that they had to make something work, I'd expect that when you turn out as many guns as Baer does. But to find someone's initials shabbily carved into the slide, well that's surprising.
The S&W that I carry daily has a botched rear sight dovetail, they chose to put a shim under the sight. I'm betting the OP's Baer looked a whole lot better on that sight/dovetail mating than my S&W does. So what Baer did worked and it looked right. And any other time I'd say who cares what it looks like UNDER the sight, but this is the one time I'd say...wow, I wouldn't expect to see that under the sight.
But who knows why people do the things that people do.
