They don't realize character classes outnumber closures 100 to 1...
From what I gather, the issue here is mostly Unicode -- literal character classes are a bad idea with Unicode data, so making them longer, and in effect discouraging their use, isn't considered a bad thing. This assumes, of course, that a significant number of people actually use non-ASCII a significant amount of the time. I really don't have the experience to comment on this last assumption.
/s
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