There are sometimes tricks that get you around this problem, too: you can sometimes patch in a trampoline, which gives you some flexibility in the instructions you get to use.
An alternate direction rather than your standard jmp/displacement/nop'ing-to-align would be to use Dyninst[1] and live patch in memory[2]. Really though, your standard hex-editor will have facilities to alter all the necessary relatives. If you have access to modify the binary, no need to put in a trampoline (though it's awfully handy when playing CTFs!)
Honestly, do we really need another static analysis tool? Hopper and radare2 have covered the open source gap fairly well. I'd put r2 on near-power-parity of IDA if you invest the time to learn and configure it, which admittedly is an expensive proposition in labor who already knows IDA. It'll take him more days in salary to learn a new platform than just to pay the 5k and get him a IDA/HexRays license.
>Honestly, do we really need another static analysis tool?
Definitely. IDA Pro is proprietary software and the possibilities of IDAPython are limited. IDA Pro mostly ignores the last two decades of research done in the field of binary program analysis. It still relies on pattern matching compilers instead of using semantics driven methods that have been around for >10ys. While there exist tools like BAP, BitBlaze, Jackstab and Bindead. They are not really usable for people w/o graduate student level understanding of program analysis. This is where Panopticon fits in.
