One serialization / encoding scheme

Enhance existing bytesrepr to optimize using write_bytes and also identify and correct places in the code where we deserialize unnecessarily. The codebase has grown organically over time, and due to tight timelines, there was no standard serialization/deserialization scheme put in place. This has led to 2 issues:

1. Multiple serialization/deserialization solutions in use and
2. the need to serialize/deserialize data unnecessarily because they don't use the same mechanism

This feature will contain at least the following tasks:
1. Research and identify all the different mechanisms in use in the code
2. Align on a standard for serialization
3. migrate all non-standard mechanisms to the standard
4. remove all unnecessary serialization/deserialization