Yes, as Falco mentioned we need to worry about 2 areas here:
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Plugin compatibility - many plugins extend serializers, we would like to minimize breaking changes
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Performance - changing serializers needs to be backed with hard data.
I recommend looking at some of the serializers involved in topic or topic list pages and using them as testing grounds:
Then use “before” and “after” figures of discoruse bench. It will give you a very accurate feel of the progress made.
The amount of ecosystem disruption we are open to accepting heavily depends on the performance improvement here.