Enzie, I don't know if this will be any help to you, but this is what I do now, as a student, and plan to continue when I finish school this spring. I stretch my own canvases. That way I can always have the size that fits the painting best. Right now I have the convenience of having the school store just down the hall, but when I get home I plan to lay in a supply of different sized stretcher bars. I buy linen by the roll, the largest roll I can afford, keeping the price per square inch as low as possible. I use Claessens #13, double primed linen. I use the Fredrix stretchers, mostly because that's what the school store carries. The Utrecht brand is nice too, they're a little thicker than the Fredrix.
I think the reason you found so many different sizes in your research is that the size of the canvas is an important part of the composition. What I've been taught is to compose the painting first, through thumbnails, sketches, color studies, then to do the cartoon (finished size drawing in charcoal) - then crop it to the right size, stretch a canvas and start painting.
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