I think the problem with the old titratiometric methods is that they measure more than just the A-Acid; a bunch of other stuff can also show up, depending on the age of the sample.
The fact that some of the reagents are fairly unpleasant doesnt help either, Lead Acetate is possibly the fastest way known to get lead into your system (well other than Tetraethyl Lead, and they wont even let us put that in cars any more)
UV/Vis spectroscopy is still pretty common and many large breweries still use this method, (Blue Tongue locally and Coopers that I have talked to) but HPLC is taking over. The price of good HPLC machines is coming down; the old nick name High Priced Liquid Chromatography is a bit less relevant.
HPLC (High Pressure Liquid Chromatography) with an internal standard appears to be the best method, at around $200 / sample; you have to really want to know.
Talking to one of the hop merchant a while ago and they get all their hops tested this way, so I think you can be fairly confident that the Harvest Alpha is going to be accurate, from then on its down to how well the hops are stored.
There was one other method involving optical rotation, but for some reason it appears not to have received much support, although it sounds interesting and could be explored further.
If anyone comes up with a home test kit that is reasonably accurate (as much as I would like to know) I would be getting a patent before I posted on AHB we are talking fairly serious money.
Good luck with that project it would be a great development.
MHB