But it did help in the other way, in my reading of the paper [1]. So the OP is asking why this is not even an option on supported environments, and I too think that this is indeed a good question to ask.

[1] "Hugo Gualandi reported that just adding the gcc attribute __attribute__((packed)) to the definition of the structure TValue reduces its size from 16 to 9 bytes, without any sensible difference in performance."

We figured that it wasn't worth dealing with the hassle of unaligned addresses because the more portable alternatives worked just as well.