Calculating spreading resistance in heat sinks

Accident?
Consider the scenario where a designer wishes to incorporate a newly developed device into a system and soon learns that a heat sink is needed to cool the device. The designer finds a rather large heat sink in a catalog which marginally satisfies the required thermal criteria. Due to other considerations, such as fan noise and cost constraints, an attempt to use a smaller heat sink proved futile, and so the larger heat sink was accepted into the design. A prototype was made which, unfortunately, burned-out during the initial validation test, the product missed the narrow introduction time, and the project was canceled. What went wrong?
The reasons could have been multi-fold. But, under this scenario, the main culprit could have been the spreading resistance that was overlooked during the design process. It is very important for heat sink users to realize that, unless the heat sink is custom developed for a specific application, thermal performance values provided in vendor's catalogs rarely account for the additional resistances coming from the size and location considerations of a heat source. It is understandable that the vendors themselves could not possibly know what kind of devices the users will be cooling with their products.