The working group regext is not just about #EPP. #RDAP is important, too, and has several drafts. Also, "registry" is not just domain name registry, RIR exist, too. (Current draft: IP and ASN search in RDAP)
I've previously[1] talked about how stupid #WHOIS is, and while #RDAP is an improvement, it's still really just a bunch of information bits based on (regional) convention.
A human can usually quickly identify e.g., the owning legal entity from inspection of of the data, but good luck doing that programmatically. It's infuriating.
The whois replacement https://rdap.org blocks the standard Perl LWP(standard HTTP library) user agent (HTTP 403). You are supposed to write clients for their REST API though, right? #perl#rdap#domains