Hm. If that’s how it is, that’s how it is? Just seems odd to me that if you can point the Steam installer to the 110 GB download, and it’s able to intelligently skip over what’s already there, then it stands to reason that it should be able to do the same with the 1.6 GB download, skip over what’s already there and only download any changes.
At any rate, if there’s no way to get around re-downloading part of the game from the internet, then it seems this advantage for Steam is mostly a lost cause. You can move over the 1.6 GB base part, but you still need to re-download it, then what’s the point? Might as well get the permission-locked MS Store version where you have to do that anyway and then cut 1 storefront out of the equation. Is that really the deal? No way to move the Steam game to another PC in a workable state without going online eh?