Well my example problem is just an example that represents the basic problem. I don't have any foreknowledge of the regexes that will be used, because they're all generated dynamically from user input that's supposed to be as general as possible. I'm sure that most of the time I'd be safe with reshaping the regexes like this:

my @vars;
/ (?: (\d) (?{ push @{ $vars[1] }, $1 })
       \w )+
  \d\w/x;
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But I want things to work under all possible cases. That's basically where things stand: I don't have a concrete example where it's necessary, but I don't want to not work when that situation comes up. I'll either try to live with the speed I have, (de|re)structure everything, or roll my own finite state machine.

elusion : http://matt.diephouse.com