Well, it's not like x86 unaligned access was some cute thing they did just to make it extra complex. It made complete sense in 1976 when designing an ISA that might support implementations with an 8 bit memory bus and no cache. Why eat more bus cycles than you need?
Fast forward a decade or so and all processors had cache and multi-byte memory bus so the unaligned access and compact instruction streams are no longer necessary.
But processors these days are complex multi core beasts with IEEE fpu, simd units, mmu, memory controller, cache controller, pci-e northbridge, all kinds of voltage/thermal interplay, and even iGPU. ISA is over emphasized.
Fast forward a decade or so and all processors had cache and multi-byte memory bus so the unaligned access and compact instruction streams are no longer necessary.
But processors these days are complex multi core beasts with IEEE fpu, simd units, mmu, memory controller, cache controller, pci-e northbridge, all kinds of voltage/thermal interplay, and even iGPU. ISA is over emphasized.