Not handling unaligned access gracefully is a classic RISC "feature", as part of the general simplification of a processor to its basics. I'm not sure if it's really an Alpha specific thing. Plus they added some instructions to ease the pain in 1996.

The main issue people tend to bring up with Alpha is the very loose memory model, of the "things happen, but different processors may not really agree on the order they happened in" type of thing (plus, isn't it rude to want to know what other cores have in their cache?). Which would be a pain in our modern multicore world.

Of course we don't know how things would've evolved over time, ARM (at least on big cores[1]) shifted towards the forgiving model for unaligned access, it's possible over time Alpha would've similarly moved to a more forgiving environment for low level programmers.

[1] On embedded stuff, you're going to the Hardfault handler.