My radical idea for regex readability is to integrate tablets into development. Touchscreens can be a convenient way to manipulate a Finite State Machine (which is what regexen are). Once saved, it would create a compiled form of the NFA that can be accessed using some API call (similar to Regexp::Common).

The main difficulty is that Perl's regexen go way beyond just FSMs. How would you represent capturing on the tablet, for instance? I'm also not sure if Perl5's regex engine can be easily given a serialized input.