The point is to be able to have middleware that only runs on certain urls. For example, you might have middleware that only runs on a particular version of you

The point is to be able to have middleware that only runs on certain urls. For example, you might have middleware that only runs on a particular version of your API (`regexp: ^/1\/.*/`). I've used it fairly extensively. The point being, now you're describing a completely different, less powerful framework. Which, yes, of course it's faster. You'll notice that's what Netflix ended up doing - they moved to `restify` from `express`. You might as well just only allow routes to be strings and then you have the constant-time map implementation that the article describes as the expected implementation.