Depends what you call waste! Everything has a price, in this instance to use a standardised protocol, there's a bit of overhead.
The "standardised protocol", I'm sure has its applications, but if you are trying to handle 200 nodes the overhead becomes prohibitive (I tend to recall 32 mentioned in this thread)

Also, consider reliability - even for a few bytes its wise to have a checksum - for small payloads this also adds a substantial percentage overhead
I wrote "request need only addres and 1 byte (at the most two) plus checksum."

There is overhead you can save with no ill effect, the checksum is not part of that.

Erik