getblocktemplate request that omits transactions?
getmininginfo or getdifficulty are useless as they return the difficulty of the most recently mined block, not the block that is currently being mined.


The network difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks (~2 weeks), so to accomplish your goal (track the network difficulty) there is no need to continuously return the difficulty of every new block. It will only change once every 2016 blocks, so getmininginfo should do the trick.