I'm looking at the std profile, contract manager, and for some custom objects in our org, they have CRUD privileges for a bunch of objects and no access whatsoever to a bunch more. What drives the privileges to be set this way when it comes to standard profiles?
EDIT- oddly, enough I checked all 6 STD profiles and 4 of them had the same CRUD access to the same custom objects. Read-only could only read those same objects...
I suspect there maybe a historical thing going on here?
Standard Profiles come default with set User Permissions. User Profiles and their customizations are set based on the org type:
In Contact Manager, Group, and Professional Edition organizations, you can assign standard profiles to your users, but you can't view or edit the standard profiles or create custom profiles. In Enterprise, Unlimited, and Developer Edition organizations, you can use standard profiles, or create, edit, and delete custom profiles. For standard profiles, only certain settings can be changed.
Each standard or custom profile belongs to exactly one user license type.
Essentially, these profiles are set up and only some of them allow certain functionality. Not all of the profiles allow access to certain objects (specifically, profiles associated to Portals are very restrictive). This is just how the profiles are set up.
The only way to assign users standard profiles and then "customise" them is to clone those profiles, typically as Custom: Standard Profile Name, after which you will have full control over the profile settings.
I suspect (as you mentioned) that standard profiles are hard-baked into the platform due to some historical architecture decision.
To add to what's been said above and to provide some documentation that further validates it, from p.140 - 141 of the Force.com Fundamentals Workbook, also sometimes referred to by some as the "Creating on Demand Apps pdf":
Standard Profiles
The platform provides the following set of standard profiles in every organization:
• Read Only
• Standard User
• Marketing User
• Contract Manager
• Solution Manager
• System Administrator
Each of these standard profiles includes a default set of permissions for all of the standard objects available on the platform.
When a custom object is created, most profiles (except those with “Modify All Data”) don't give access to the object. You can find more detailed descriptions of all the standard profiles in the online help, but the important thing to know is that you can never edit the object permissions on a standard profile. If you have access to the Enterprise, Unlimited, or Developer Editions of the platform, it’s a good idea to make copies of the standard profiles and then customize the copies to fit the needs of your organization.
