Yeah, obviously getting the project done is highest priority. So if it works, and you're at .5 mA average, its good enough.
Still though, WiFi's specs are pretty awful. It bothers me to see such huge numbers whenever people talk about WiFi. And since we're in tiny microcontroller land, its not like any of us are actually tranferring GBs or MBs of data. We're all just passing a few kB, so much slower protocols (ex: Zigbee) are very reasonable.
Things start to get silly below the 500uA levels anyway. You start worrying about aluminum capacitors with 22uA leakage current and such... and realizing you need to upgrade to Tantalum capacitors with specified 2uA or 1uA leakage.
Still though, WiFi's specs are pretty awful. It bothers me to see such huge numbers whenever people talk about WiFi. And since we're in tiny microcontroller land, its not like any of us are actually tranferring GBs or MBs of data. We're all just passing a few kB, so much slower protocols (ex: Zigbee) are very reasonable.
Things start to get silly below the 500uA levels anyway. You start worrying about aluminum capacitors with 22uA leakage current and such... and realizing you need to upgrade to Tantalum capacitors with specified 2uA or 1uA leakage.