I think you're being much too polite, and probably unfairly blaming this insanity on Abigail, rather than the original author, Damien Conway.

I think you're misreading me. I prefer to have all my ugly hacks hidden behind nice, neat APIs. Regexp::Common provides a nice, neat API (though how "nice" or "neat" could be debated, but it's still an API). In this case, where we're using re 'eval', it also nicely partitions my tainted code away from evals. That is, I can use those "common" regular expressions (with all of their re-eval trickery), without exposing any of the rest of my code to possible injection attacks. This doesn't absolve me from proper untainting of my input, of course, it merely lowers the risk without reducing the power.