I agree with what you have said within its own context. It is more important to make the stuff correct than to make it faster. No problem here.

But your write up cannot be used against Tim Bray's, as you did nothing to compare Perl's regexp against Java's as the original author did. What you did was to compare Perl's with Perl's, the Perl one that was faster but not quite right with another Perl one that is slower but right.

What if the Java one is not only faster but also correct? This is the key question you need to answer. If both are right, faster is obviously better.