Just something to think about but the dotNet regex library supports named captures:

(?<NAME>PATTERN)
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While you are hacking this funky stuff maybe such a thing would also be cool. Maybe you could use %+ to hold the captures? So

if ('demerphq'=~/(?<perlmonk>\w+)/) {
  print $+{perlmonk}
}
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would work. I mean its a bit embarrassing that dotNet has a cool regex feature that perl doesn't. (IMO anyway. :-)

Thanks for your efforts japhy.