You're worried that if you optimize something now, it might turn out to be wasted effort in the future.

But more importantly, if your system is working now, as-is, then it's wasted effort here in the present!

That said, minimizing server-client traffic is generally a good idea, especially if the clients are out in the real world, on unknown networks, and so on. In that case you'll also need to deal with recovering state from short outages, and so on, so at least sometimes you'll probably need to send the entire state.

But for now, if it works as-is, stop, and move on to the next bit.

You're worried that if you optimize something now, it might turn out to be wasted effort in the future.

But more importantly, if your system is working now, as-is, then it's wasted effort here in the present!

That said, minimizing server-client traffic is generally a good idea, especially if the clients are out in the real world, on unknown networks, and so on. In that case you'll also need to deal with recovering state from short outages and crashes, so at least sometimes you'll probably need to send the entire state.

But for now, if it works as-is, stop, and move on to the next bit.