I don't need to use it much, but when I do, it's an ever-increasing royal pain in the ass.
My current plight revolves around not being able to get full dumps of objects. Certain mandatory fields in objects are 'filtered' and/or replaced with dummy data. This poses a problem because one can no longer simply cut and paste the output, change the necessary bits and fire it off to rr@arin.net for processing. WhoisRWS doesn't seem to have hooks into the IRR database like RIPE seems to have gotten right.
So how do people tend to get around this? Is there something that I'm missing or do people just throw their hands up and move their IRR data to RADB or something?
You will notice right at the top of the output there is a hint on getting an unfiltered object. Try using the -B flag on your query to get around this.
[elm:usrako]: whois -h rr.arin.net " 64.50.224.0 "
% This is the ARIN Routing Registry.
% Note: this output has been filtered.
% To receive output for a database update, use the "-B" flag.
Indeed, however that doesn't help with the dummy objects that also make it impossible to use the output as a new template like everyone has been doing for a hundred years.