At first, it seems a bit wasteful to have to constantly poll for updates. But most controller implementations will send a packet to every device on the link periodically to make sure that device is still present. It's not significantly more overhead to send a packet to get the parameters you care about periodically than to just send GET QUEUED_MESSAGES.
As Scott said, then the user opens a window to edit a parameter, it's probably a good idea to get the latest values for everything anyway.
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