As we were originally discussing emacs I don't really see the problem with how you indent. Decide on how much you want to indent then let the user decide if they want emacs to indent with tabs and spaces or just spaces. Converting is trivial. If they are not using emacs then it's their problem. :-)
First you said alignment "magically" works with tabs. Now that I've shown
that to be false, you've switched to saying alignment is a waste of time.
I can't say I agree, but I think this conversation has run it's course anway.