Reading your description, I tend to agree with you, but then I'm a known regex abuser anyway:)

If you posted a small example of the task you want to solve, it would be fun to compare solutions.

Minor nit: Shouldn't your first example be 

    /(foo)+ #<<?
     (bar)?
     (bif){3,5}
    /x;

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"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
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In reply to Re: Re: Re: Abusing Regular Expressions by BrowserUk
in thread Abusing Regular Expressions by samtregar

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