Inspecting a few range blocks gives me the impression that they are more or less useless, and creates more havoc and disasters than any real positive effect. In a lot of cases it seems like a single difficult user triggers a range block covering tens of thousands of addresses, even up to a million or more addresses.

It is pretty obvious that such range blocks creates a lot of trouble and should be avoided, but it is also very difficult to get through to admins that create the range blocks. It seems like they think that fighting a lone vandal is more important than whatever project they try to "protect".

Either the possibility to do range block must be removed from the projects, or the offending admins must be removed, or some alternate or moderating mechanism must be created. I guess the first two are not an option, then the last one is the only acceptable one. As a bare minimum it should be possible to set up address ranges that a range block can't cover, or patterns that should not exist in the whois report for the address range.