while the board is disseminated with small hints about the next major release we haven't made a public announce yet, the work being done is massive and we have no release dates set as of now.
Also--I really think you need to include an encryption option on the server as well. Maybe you can request a public key on the server, much like you can request a random number. And then use that to encrypt/decrypt all the traffic.
I'd say encryption yes
Encrypting all the traffic no (or at least, not recommended at all)
With a binary protocol decoding traffic decryption it's not going to be an easy task and encryption (proper one) costs some good server performance and should be used with parsimony (or big multi-cores )