Perhaps there are issues I have not considered, but I always appreciated the fact that original netcat accepts "serialized" IP addresses, as the author calls them. For example, 127.1 as shorthand for 127.0.0.1.
23.185.0.4 (www.usenix.org) can be abbreviated as 23.185.4
192.0.79.32 (hackaday.com) cannot be abbreviated as 192.79.32