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@b0rk the bus size shouldn't matter too much - many things are non-power-of-2 sized in terms of data and address buses inside processors and other electronics.

one benefit of power-of-2 sizes is that the size of the element in bits itself encodes as a single set bit. 8 in binary is 0b00001000. 16 is 0b00010000. if you had a 10-bit byte the size (10 in decimal) would encode as 0b0000001010. so reasoning about the size of things in a computer for non-power-of-2 bytes gets trickier.