Good point about the text and other data formats, I did not even think of those. I think keeping it simple here also means not assuming too much how the data will be used.
Ideally I would like to see the “interpretation” (valuetype) separated from the raw requests (binary data). Since you might want to just query all the registers at once, and then intrerpret some as float32, some as uint16 etc. I think good place to do this kind modification would be openhab2 migration and changes related to that. As far as I understand the new item /thing /channel configuration approach in openhab2 would make this really convenient.
What do you think?
Edit : example of one way how configuration could be structured in openhab2. The post did not comment on valuetype though…
Edit2: yes indeed start denotes the register (or coil / discrete input), so it would make sense that length has the same interpretation. However the read index defined in the item definition is different, see wiki for details. The item read index has different interpretation depending of valuetype.