In the end, automata are automata and anything that tries to do what regex's do winds up looking a lot like regex's -- which look a lot like regular expressions (as a representation of a finite state machine). The difference between "regex alternatives" and regex's is that the alternatives tend to be more verbose and less well documented...and less likely to elicit good answers on StackOverflow...and perhaps less likely to generate good questions there.
I think the hard part of pattern matching is reasoning about pattern matching. The obscurity of Regex notation is mostly a function of unfamiliarity with the concepts. [:word:]+ is not easier to reason about than \w+ and "\w+" is much better documented than "[:word:]+" or "Word + [1+]."
The other problem with learning Regex's is that regex notation is someone else's code. There's always the attraction of fixing it. I've dunning-kuger'ed it myself. Fortunately, making my new more sensible superduper regex notation complete required RTFM'ing...and then I'd read the manual and realized I'd already fixed regex notation by fixing the absence of knowledge in my head. Plus I could talk to other people about pattern matching using the common language of pattern matching.
I think the hard part of pattern matching is reasoning about pattern matching. The obscurity of Regex notation is mostly a function of unfamiliarity with the concepts. [:word:]+ is not easier to reason about than \w+ and "\w+" is much better documented than "[:word:]+" or "Word + [1+]."
The other problem with learning Regex's is that regex notation is someone else's code. There's always the attraction of fixing it. I've dunning-kuger'ed it myself. Fortunately, making my new more sensible superduper regex notation complete required RTFM'ing...and then I'd read the manual and realized I'd already fixed regex notation by fixing the absence of knowledge in my head. Plus I could talk to other people about pattern matching using the common language of pattern matching.