Interesting timing, I've been playing around with Cortex M chips and a lot of the demo code has structures that are almost pathologically mis-aligned things like

   struct SomeCamelCaseNonsenseStructure {
       uint8_t flag;
       uint32_t pointer;
       uint8_t another_flag;
       uint32_t another_pointer;
       ...
   }

I feel like flinching every time I read it.