Are you talking performance overhead or cognitive overhead? I think the cognitive overhead of adding socket support to the Ruby Tracker is lower, because it means your client code is instrumented in the same way - using the standard Ruby Tracker API - whether you use a socket emitter or an HTTP emitter.
Performance-wise, I don’t see why there’d be any impact if the socket emitter was bundled as part of the Ruby Tracker versus being hand-rolled…
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your point?