Black hole (BH) area quantization may be the key to unlocking a unifying theory of quantum gravity (QG). Surmounting evidence in the field of BH research continues to support a horizon (surface) area with a discrete and uniformly spaced spectrum, but there is still no general agreement on the level spacing. In the specialized and important BH case study, our objective is to report and examine the pertinent groundbreaking work of the strictly thermal and nonstrictly thermal spectrum level spacing of the BH horizon area quantization with included entropy calculations, which aims to tackle this gigantic problem. In particular, such work exemplifies a series of imperative corrections that eventually permits a BH's horizon area spectrum to be generalized from strictly thermal to nonstrictly thermal with entropy results, thereby capturing multiple preceding developments by launching an effective unification between them. Moreover, the results are significant because quasi-normal modes (QNM) and "effective states" characterize the transitions between the established levels of the nonstrictly thermal spectrum.