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Thanks for your time Val, I really appreciate this.

I take note that previous/existing versions won't be updated, I can understand this.
I'm really glad the fix is part of the R81.20 release, whether is was intentional or a side effect of the new installer. 😉

I wish the issue was clearly documented -- maybe this will happen once R81.20 is released.
Right now, Best practices for running SMS on VMware (sk104848) states you should "make sure the disk partitions within the guest are aligned"... but omits to say Gaia installer (up to R81.10) will forbid you from doing so.

What brought the issue back to my attention recently was a customer with abysmal SmartEvent performance.
A colleague of mine spent days relocating the log server to a new hosting infrastructure and reindexing everything, only to get a minor performance improvement.
When I had a look at it, the misalignment issue was obvious to me. With a few decades of systems/storage experience, misaligned partitions bring back old memories of poorly performing database workloads, wrongly designed/poorly documented storage vendor fixes (I'm looking at you, NetApp!) and so on.
I knew I saw it before on Check Point installs, but only then realized ALL of them are affected: old and new appliances, open servers, even CloudGuard IaaS Azure instances.
We did NOT spend more days fixing this for this specific customer -- we probably won't until he brings it back and we get an officially supported procedure for this. But I did run some tests on my own and it did not look good.