[LAU] MIDI NOTE ON/OFF Messages - reducing data

Hi LAU group, just a bit of brainstorming here. Defined in the MIDI specification is that for each NOTE ON message there has to be a NOTE OFF message (or a NOTE ON message with vol.=0). BUT: There are many instruments that in real life never need a manual action to stop their sound, for example most if not all percussion instruments and drums. For these, sound can "only" be triggered and then just plays, there is no way to stop it, apart maybe from rigorously damping it. It means: when playing vibes for example, the player hits the instrument once and then the sound just fades away. No action necessary to manally stop the sound. So: why do we have to send NOTE OFF messages for these kind of instruments? Wouldn't it be sufficient to simply sent the NOTE ON message for that sound and omit the NOTE OFF message? This would save us up to three bytes which can make a difference in delay. I'm not sure if this is true for drumkit sounds as one already has to define sound collections in a SF2 file either as instrument presets or drumkits. I'm not sure either how to introduce such a feature in the MIDI world, however, I can see that it might be rather difficult. Both sender (MIDI keyboard) and receiver (synth, expander, some software) need to agree that a particular sound does not need NOTE OFF messages and therefore the devices neither need to transmit nor wait to receive it. Maybe it could be done by introducing a new controller that disables NOTE OFF messages for a particular channel, so that all instruments that play on that channel would never need any NOTE OFF messages. Any comments/ ideas here? Crypto.