Unity UI Setting Vertical Layout Group Alignment/Padding per child?

Hi! I'm building a very rough texting-app style UI for a small project, and I have a system in place for instantiating and placing dialogue text objects within a scrollable screen. My main issue at the moment is figuring out how to align them in a way that matches most popular texting apps-- with sent texts aligning to and growing from the right side, received texts from the left side, and system messages from the middle.

Here's a picture of my layout for my UI at the moment:

The "Scroll area" is a simple Scroll Rect with a Mask that scrolls the "Messages Zone," the parent for the texts that I instantiate. Messages Zone has a Vertical Layout Group component that handles the spacing, padding and alignment for individual texts spawned into it, which controls how far messages are apart as well as throttles their maximum width before the text inside wraps to another line. It also uses a Content Size Fitter to grow in height as more objects are added inside it. I'd like to find a way to set both the alignment and the padding on these spawned "received text" objects on the fly depending on their purpose. Is there a script or component I could use to accomplish this? Or will I have to use a different approach entirely? Let me know if there's any more info I can provide.

 

Hi! Did you manage to figure something out for this? I've been looking for a similar thing and can't seem to figure it out