Honest answer:
I've talked about Alpha in the past. Extensively.
He was never built to be an ongoing thing. Or an actual sidekick.
His story was meant to be a one-off story, but budgetary concerns got the one giant story chopped up into 3 parts.
And I don't think it works well that way. (Though I have gotten good feedback from fans who first read the story in the trade-- and read it as one, big story all in one go.)
The 5 part structure of his original story was meant to be (and this would've been told over the course of 48 or more pages):
1. A high school kid from Midtown High goes to Peter's lab and gets great power.
2. Peter feels responsible for him and takes him under his wing as a sidekick.
3. The kid's power grows to be greater than Spidey's. The kid's a jerk with his power and uses it irresponsibly.
4. Spidey takes the kid down.
5. Peter uses his scientific know how to take the kid's powers away. THE END.
The problem was, we built the kid up to be a jerk so you'd get why Spidey had to take his power away.
But when the story was teased as "Spidey gets a sidekick" and then broken up into multiple parts... readers got mad because "Spidey's sidekick" was a jerk, and why would we do that?
And then the bigger problem was... the first part sold phenomenally well and sales/marketing wanted to keep the character around and do a mini-series with him.
That meant we had to change the ending... and Spidey could only take *part* of his power away. And that's a WEIRD mixed message that makes absolutely no sense.
It kinda messed up the greater story.
In my mind, the story was finished after I turned in the script for part three, and I never felt a need to revisit the character again.
That is night-and-day from Spider-Boy, who we built to be Spidey's sidekick from his first appearance on.
I get that, but why not a simple one vs the other or in a flashback? If they ever met during his time around?