I would be fine with any of the following 3 approaches:

1) Mandate that store/loads do not support misaligned pointers and introduce separate misaligned instructions (good for correctness, so its my personal preference).

2) Mandate that store/loads always support misaligned pointers.

3) Mandate that store/loads do not support misaligned pointers unless Zicclsm/Oilsm/whatever is available.

If hardware wants to implement a slow handling of misaligned pointers for some reason, it's squarely responsibility of the hardware's vendor. And everyone would know whom to blame for poor performance on some workloads.

We are effectively going to end up with 3, but many years later and with a lot of additional unnecessary mess associated with it. Arguably, this issue should've been long sorted out in the age of ratification of the I extension.