[nyanpasu64]

Can bass be fixed to remove this design flaw?

Is xkas/asar worse than bass? A lot of SMW-adjacent romhacking tools use xkas/asar which preceded bass (the author discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11720057).

Some alternatives I've come across include macro packs for ca65 to make it assemble for instruction sets it doesn't understand natively, and I hear tass64 has macro packs too.

[tadfisher]

Unfortunately the author passed away recently. If there is a community fork of bass that would make it easier.

[nyanpasu64]

Yes there is a community fork: https://github.com/ARM9/bass