Here is a suggestion...that will work in your clients are using SDE.
1. In ArcMap, create a grid covering the geographic area of your data
2. Write a program in ArcObjects that determines the inserts/updates/deletes between two versions, like SDE.DEFAULT and a child version. When determining what has changed, use the geometry of the changed record to spatially determine what polygon was affected from the grid you created in step 1.
3. Then you could create a shape file that only contains the updated grids, and then re-cache that area.