Regex syntax is fairly gross, I agree. That being said I'd be surprised to your open-coded version of simple regexes like /hatstand.*teakettle/ or /badgerbrush

Regex syntax is fairly gross, I agree. That being said I'd be surprised to your open-coded version of simple regexes like /hatstand.*teakettle/ or /badgerbrush\s{12}/ was clearer than the regex, and it would almost certainly be dismally slow relative to a tuned regex implementation - unless you wrote a lot of one-off SIMD code. Further, if given a bunch of different regexes to match simultaneously, your code would have to run them one by one. Finally, quite frequently our customers/users are in a situation where they don't know what the regex is going to be, and they aren't going to let people inject arbitrary code into their applications.