Hello,
sorry for the late answer.
arsxml is the official way to do it. If you want to look into the database, feel free, but don't complain if in the future the format change, and additionally your are NOT supported if you change something in the database directly and not using arsxml or the admin client.
The output of arsxml is XML, so with any tool and some programming skills you can do whatever you want. If you must do it manually, then you must ask someone with the skills to automate your needs.
If you want that arsxml should be upgraded to your customer needs, then that's perfect, we are looking for such upgrade, then please contact your sales representative and discuss with him how to enhanced this tool.
In Switzerland, we have requested lots of new features, and we had some of them implemented into CMOD. The most important was the possibility to use the multilanguage in all CMOD objects (folder name, field search, ...).
If you wait that CMOD see what you and your customer needs, then you are out of luck and can wait 10000 years. So please speak up, and tell IBM what are YOUR requirements, and with luck you'll see them in the next release.
But be aware that you might be challenged.
The other way to do it, is to put your requirement in the ODUG forum concerning the new requirement, and once a year ODUG will give all the customer needs to the CMOD developpers
http://www.odusergroup.org/forums/index.php?board=2.0.
That said, the ball is on your side.
Yours sincerely,
Alessandro