Halyard Weight Savings for Shields

Our winter project this year has been to ready a 1968 Shields for racing in time for it's 40th
birthday. Along the way we've had the chance to come up with quite a few rigging tricks and
upgrades, but one common upgrade got us thinking. How much weight do you actually save
when changing out old tech for new when it comes to the boats running rigging?

This boat was a perfect candidate for going lightweight, as the halyards were pretty much
the same technical vintage as the boat itself. The spinnaker halyard was a gigantic 1/2" poly
halyard, which has the virtues of being stretchy, heavy and slow over sheaves. The main
and jib were wire-rope halyards, which always makes me cringe when I see them on a
racing boat. Now, wire-rope really has it's uses, cruising rigging (where the wire wears
better for extreme long term use, say if you're spending days on stbd tack!) and boats with
halyard locks being a few examples. But. 88 is not cruising around the world, and it doesn't
have a halyard lock (too bad!). In addition, the wire portion of the halyard was really short;
on both halyards the wire only went half the length of the mast. Why, I dont know, but this
setup combined the worst of both wire and rope. It was heavy, hard on sheaves/mast/gear,
and stretchy. The only thing I can possibly say that was good about 88's old rigging was
that it lasted, and the shackles weren't too gigantically oversized.