Yeah, grammars seem easy at first, but they're full of arcane knowledge like writing your tokens with the right affinity and greediness, ensuring back tracking

Yeah, grammars seem easy at first, but they're full of arcane knowledge like writing your tokens with the right affinity and greediness, ensuring back tracking is performant, and that you'll get good error messages. Same with parser combinators. Not until a bunch of trial and error do you build up the intuitions you need to use them in production, I think. Despite two decades of using those, I've found it much simpler to write my own scanning or RD parser.